So I know that Google searches are now personalised, based on your previous search history. But the recommendations it makes in the predictive text as you type a search, are also fed by what the world is searching for. This was used in a campaign about the racism against Romanians, as Google predicts ‘stupid’ as the word most commonly search for after ‘Romanians are’.

In this vein, I wondered what other interesting things could come up. Here’s some examples, which I realise might be influenced by who Google thinks I am…

1. I/we think about time, work, money and the meaning of life.

2. I/we wonder about the science of the sky, and are generally pretty tired

3. Apparently I/we care about finding Chuck Norris. I really, really, don’t.

4. I’ve never searched for any of these things either. So that must be the world’s fault. So people care about some TV show, work (again), basic maths and being fat. That’s depressing.

5. The only one I might be responsible for here is ‘what is my ip’. So everyone else is trying to find a car and a hifi, and needs a watch.

I’m stopping now because the results are just annoying me. Searching ‘who’ suggested ‘who is in I’m a celebrity 2011′ as the top result. Really, world? Really?! Is there any hope for humanity?

I love looking at site analytics, and one of the most interesting and useful things to look at are search terms people use to find your site. So you can really look at what topics people are interested in. I had a look at how people come to my site via Google, grabbed the top 20 phrases and put them into Wordle. I didn’t weight the most commonly used ones against the 20th most commonly used one, but this still gives a good representation of the key themes people search for, that I write about.