No one goes there any more, it's too crowded

Tyler Cowen points to Google trends, which will track how popular a search term is and the top ten cities searching for it. I'm with some of his commentors: the high rankings for Indian/Chinese cities for terms like economics and physics are signs of unsophistication. They're steps up from "stuff," but not as much as you might think. (Stuff is an Aussie/New Zealand/UK axis of stupidity, incidentally. Pay no attention to the city behind the curtain number eight! Or maybe it's the magazine.)

Prurient search terms are fun. Cairo, Ankara, and Istanbul make the top ten for sex, as does Chicago, presumably undergrads attempting to learn about this rumored phenomenon. Why are Indonesians and Latin Americans so curious about the vagina? (Tehran is number one for its crudest synonym, with the Aussies dominating the lower rankings.) Staying with an Islamic theme, you really don't want to drop the soap in a Turkish prison...or even one of their elementary schools. Yikes.

Neither the Frenchmen nor South Americans can find the clitoris; are they better lovers because they care enough to learn, or is it all a sham? Other Europeans take a carpet bombing approach to the problem. Then there's the USA!!! vs. our ignorant cousins. But really, go where the work takes you.

Update: Fixed some bad links. Or I tried. I'm not sure all of the URLs you get after a search are permalinkable. Go to the front page and do your own searches if it doesn't work. But don't do it at work. Incidentally, I found to my surprise that I don't have all that inventive or dirty a mind. Could my betters let me know if Islamic countries continue to dominate the filth end of the spectrum all the way down?

Update II: Sigh. You put aside a blog idea until the next day and discover Andrew Sullivan beat you to it. He did teach me, however, that I should be clicking on the "region" tab and not just looking at cities. Congratulations, Turkey, as a nation you're only second for child pr0n. Way to go.

Update III: Hah, this guy discovers that Nice, France is full of Tom Cruise fans.

Update IV: Playing with the region button, I'm more and more convinced the real story is how sex obsessed Australians are. They're usually dominating the US on raw numbers, let alone on a per capita basis. Third world countries, Islamic or not, at least have the excuses of less sophisticated English skills, repression of "normal" sexuality, less worry about getting caught in a law enforcement sting, and just plain less to do for fun. Either the Australians need a crusading DOJ and out of control NSA or Aussie rules football must suck more than I ever imagined.

Update V: And for my blessedly last comment - much of this is bullshit. The bottom of the page disclaimer states:

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.

I'll say. Let's take one dirty search that shows all of the top ten cities are in the U.S. But if you click on "regions" it claims that more than twice as many searches came from South Africa as from the U.S. What, they're just broadly distributed among all of those South African internet users in small villages, so they don't show up on the city chart? I think not. Perhaps IP addresses in South Africa can't be tied to a city; perhaps something much worse is going on.

Lazy sociology grad students are strongly advised not to even think about using this to prove any kind of point.

Update VI: A couple of posts at Ace of Spades find some interesting connections, some not quite as dirty as mine, some not dirty at all. More good stuff in his comments.