Only Google Trends Will Set You Free

I have, my friends, discovered a peephole into minds across the globe (and it's helped me procrastinate doing anything productive for the past hour or so). Oh, Google Trends! How have I lived without you?

Here's how it works: You enter the name of anything into the search bar, and it gives you a list of the top 10 cities or regions where people are searching for the same thing, which is calculated relative to the total searches from that area. Google Trends also has graphs of the popularity of the search over time. For instance, here are the top 10 places where people are searching for "hot women" (I'm not kidding):

1. Yemen
2. Syria
   
3. Oman
   
4. Lebanon
5. Malta
6. Qatar
7. Kuwait
8. Saudi Arabia
9. Iran
10. Egypt
    

I've also learned:

• The United States comes in third in the frequency of searches for "Iraq War." Number one is, appropriately, Iraq. Second place goes to, um, Bangladesh.
• The U.S. also places third in another search: "wardrobe malfunction." Americans don't even come close on this one; India blows us out of the water with its interest in the so-long-ago Jackson/Timberlake/FCC fiasco.
  
• South Africans are a lot more interested in Focus on the Family founder James Dobson than Americans are.
  
• Americans are (duh) obsessed with Anna Nicole Smith, but we sadly fail in taking the gold in the category. The most obsessed? Pakistanis. Is your world crashing down yet?
  
• Paris and Nicole appeal to different cultures. Interest in Paris is very high south of the border, with Guatemala, Ecuador and Venezuela all making the top five (the U.S. doesn't crack the top 10), Whereas Nicole is the one on the minds of teenage boys in Australia, Sweden and New Zealand.
  

Google Trends also lets you compare the popularity of multiple terms at once, allowing you to create visually stunning graphs like this one:



Notice the only time when interest in Cheney soared past Lindsay was when he shot that guy in the face! What a country! Heck, what a world!