Be Careful What You Ask For
Several weeks ago I wrote a story with the headline “Porn of the Gods,” which ranked peculiarly high on the Los Angeles Times website’s list of most e-mailed stories for that weekend. Since I had displayed no more than my usual Jovian wit, I had to conclude this rise to prominence had to do with the use of the word “porn.” Something like 25%--that is, 68 million--of all daily search-engine requests are sexually oriented, according to a survey by Websense, a web-filter company specializing in business productivity.
It occurred to me that I might exploit this mechanism and raise my profile in cyberspace by merely including, in a random and gratuitous way, sexually provocative words amid my usual high-minded and recondite discursions. Spanking. Big and bouncy. Down on the farm. That’s good for several million readers right there.
Hereafter, I may insist that headlines for my car reviews include similarly magnetic words and phrases. For example: “Pontiac Solstice, Topless Cheap Slut of a Sports Car.” It’s the metalinguistic version of phishing. In this way shall I prosper.
Actually, a lot of companies keep track of what is known as the query stream--the endless billions of search engine requests from Google, Yahoo, AOL and others--and a fascinating metric it is, too. Churned out in real time, with AOL offering an update every 10 seconds, the query stream is the torrent of our collective curiosity, and our stunning lack of curiosity. Terms come and go like rain under busy windshield wipers.
As I’m writing this, it’s Nov. 21. The top search term for the week ending Nov. 14 on Google’s Zeitgeist page was “Eddie Guerrero,” a professional wrestler who died of a suspected heart attack at 38. No. 2 was Sarah Silverman, the beautiful, transgressive comedienne whose movie “Jesus is Magic” recently hit theaters. How many of these queries requested pictures of Silverman nude? Or Guerrero? Google doesn’t say.
What a week it was. No. 3 was “California election results.” Number 4? “Jordan Queen Rania,” for no particular reason except that she is extremely hot royalty.
Some entries on the list are no surprise. Searches for the DVD edition of “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” ranked sixth. “Intelligent design” ranked ninth. Apparently, Kate Hudson (No. 11) is suing British tabloids over pictures she says wrongly portray her as wasting away from an eating disorder. I’m sure that the millions of Kate Hudson image downloads were born of purely forensic interest.
No. 14 was “Edmund Fitzgerald,” as in “The Wreck Of...” The 30th anniversary of the maritime disaster on the Great Lakes was Nov. 10. Candidly, I had forgotten that. Now I can’t get that damn Gordon Lightfoot song out of my head.
So, for the week ending Nov. 14, the perfect news story in cyberspace would be about Sarah Silverman, Kate Hudson and Queen Rania starring in a “Titanic”-style disaster movie called “Edmund Fitzgerald,” a film whose third-act surprise involved the workings of a transcendent Designer, who turns out to be Willy Wonka. Kate Hudson would play the emaciated stowaway. Oh, and by the way, in stiletto heels.
This is all fascinating information, and ever so slightly alarming, because it suggests that web content should be directed by such an intellectually numb and awful thing as popularity, which I hated in high school and loathe even more now. Actually, given the eat-free-or-die economics of the Internet, it seems the only avoirdupois that matters is “hits,” or visitors, or whatever. In November, Google launched “Google Analytics,” that will, says the company, help improve website content, in part by identifying “which keywords attract the most visitors.”
That’s fine if you are selling snowboards but not if you want the Web to be a broad marketplace of ideas. Much of the grave-dancing over mainstream media--in particular, newspapers--has had to do with how out of touch it is, how it doesn’t give readers what they want. You know what? That’s fine by me. You could probably fit all the people who read the Los Angeles Times Book Review section in a decent-sized nightclub and the ad revenue wouldn’t cover the bill. In the business model of newspapers, book review sections are wild extravagances, and yet any big newspaper that takes its public obligations seriously can’t do without one.
Don’t get me wrong. Newspapers do, and ought to, chase readers. What, after all, are the endless reader surveys and “most e-mailed stories” lists but attempts to assay what readers want? But judging by the Google Zeitgeist list, there’s such a thing as too much currency, too much popularity, too much “relevance,” in the algorithmic language of search engineering. The query stream is, after all, kind of a sewer.
