Today at work I was using the Overture keyword selector tool to find search numbers on some search terms one of our clients wants to start a PPC campaign on. Just FYI, this tool allows you to find out how many people searched for a specific search term during the previous month on Overture(Yahoo!). The tool also lists search numbers for all sorts of variations of the term you put in. For example, if you put in computer, it will list numbers for notebook computer, desktop computer and a bunch of other computer related search phrases.

As a break from this, I put my first name, Sean, into the tool just to see what variations of Sean were being searched. I was a little surprised by the results. The second most searched variation of Sean, behind Sean Paul (which is a little sad in itself), is someone named Sean Cody, with 72226 searches in the month of May. I had no idea who Sean Cody was, so I did a Wikipedia search on him. Turns out, this guy is a pornographer. So I did a little math and considering Yahoo! has around 25% or so of the search market, this means that the 72226 number probably only represents 1/4 of the searches for this guy in May. In other words, people searched for him 288904 times in May alone on all search engines or around 3.5 million searches a year.

Being that heavy pornography viewing is pretty strongly linked to serial killers, child abuse, and all sort of other deviant behavior, I found the sheer numbers of searches for someone who is, to me at least, a rather unknown pornographer pretty depressing and a rather sad representation of the state of our culture.

Categories: Life in General