What were we looking for online in 2006?

CELEBRITIES, SAYS YAHOO! The giant search engine’s list of the top 10 search terms in 2006 included Britney Spears, Shakira, Jessica Simpson, Paris Hilton, Pamela Anderson, Lindsay Lohan, Chris Brown…

Social networks and Mexican soaps, according to Google, Bebo and MySpace, two of the fastest growing social networking sites of 2006, topped Google’s list of searches.

Music/ video searches and other web 2.0 stuff came in close behind—MetaCafe (video), Radioblog (streaming radio), Mininova (audio, video, photo downloads; a great BitTorrent site), with both Wiki and Wikipedia on the list in testimony to the world’s most popular unofficial encyclopaedia. The World Cup showed at number three, and Mexican soap opera Rebelde popped up at number eight in the Google rankings.

The weather, dogs, maps, cars, tattoos, horoscopes and other human-type stuff, according to AOL. Their list featured no celebrities, unless you count the hit music talent-spotting show American Idol and nothing related to web 2.0. The classic AOL user is clearly a do-loving dictionary user fixated on the weather.

What the world wanted to watch, according to Clipblast!, were videos about croc hunter Steve Irwin, Borat, the World Cup (with Zidane’s notorious head-butt lending itself to a hundred mashups), Al Zarqawi, bad stand-up comedy and Mel Gibson videos.

Dogpile, my favourite maverick search engine, had a brilliant search list for 2006. Dogpile users were interested in Prehistoric Web stuff like e-cards, game cheats, music lyrics, but also in web 2.0 phenomena like MySpace. They were the only users to have “poetry” up there in the top 10 list.

Why do these lists vary so much? It makes sense that Google users would be more plugged into the technical side of the web, but why wouldn’t AOL’s wholesome, middle American demographic be interested in the same celebrities who apparently obsess Yahoo! users?

A key problem is that search engines filter out the two things that humans online consistently search for—porn, and other search engines. The real top 10 videos of 2006 are churned out by people like BigMama_Houston2006 or KinkyChickenTales in Ludhiana (yes, he exists) or Robothumping17 from Tokyo.

Many search mavens speculate that one of the most frequently searched for terms on Google is Yahoo! (and vice versa). Once you filter out porn and search, everything else that appears on your list is highly speculative.

What’s really wrong with these top 10 search lists, though, is that they’re in English. Take Google’s admittedly cool list, for example, allow for the inclusion of the top searches in China — and the picture changes.

“Translation software”, “machinima” (the use of computer game imagery in film and art, at its simplest) and “website for Chinese novels/ video and audio” skew the “normal” Google stats, while “censorship” rates much higher than Chinese female singer Zhou Bhichang and Britney Spears combined.

Add Indian searches to Yahoo!’s list, and watch Sania Mirza and Salman Khan knock Paris Hilton and co off the charts. We also searched for “wikipedia”, “cricket” and “go air”, incidentally.

Perhaps it’s best to stick with Dogpile’s list of the least popular questions on search in 2006: “What do snails eat?” (not fish poop, the Net tells me helpfully) and “Why is the sky blue?” It also includes the plaintive “Why can’t we be friends?”

I pity the poor soul who keyed this in; his responses include Amazon’s page on war music, a gung-ho article on employee management and communication and free ringtones. No wonder we’re still out there at a dozen search engines, searching in vain for the keys to our very own kingdoms.