Google's Hit Parade

By Mark Lawson

The roots of the word "news" remind us that journalism is supposed to be about firsts but, in reality, often settles for cold seconds. Anyone doing research in a newspaper library turns up editions - Lady Thatcher, Rod Stewart, Madonna, heart docs recommend red wine - that could have been published at almost any point since the 80s.

There are, though, two useful ways of assessing the extent to which the world is changing. One is to read a paper from front to back, noting the stories that could not plausibly have appeared a year ago; another, more recently available, is to view the names most consistently entered on internet search engines.

This late December, both exercises return unusually interesting results. The Thursday editions of the newspapers were striking for the amount of genuinely new news they contained. Photographs of two men or two women celebrating a form of marriage mark this year out as significantly transitional. So too do the stories from Lancashire about a teenage chemistry student’s bedroom being raided by counter-terrorist police. This overreaction would simply not have happened if the London bombings in July had not given fresh status to local rumours of bubbling test tubes.

The sense that this has been a year in which the world turned to an unusual degree is slightly dampened by the application of the web test. The annual hit list of Google searches is a sort of global opinion poll of public interests with the advantage that, while people are notorious for lying to pollsters, they are honest with their search engines. Depressingly, though, the surfers have chosen rather familiar waves.

Startlingly, this year a single American family has two members in the Top Ten: not the Bushes but the Jacksons. Admittedly, neither Janet (at No 1) nor Michael (at No 6) makes this hit parade for reasons that leave a parent proud. The higher-placed sibling got the fingers of American men moving with an online bootleg video that shows her sunbathing naked. This film was a sort of full-frame portrait of what had previously only been available as a detail: Jackson’s slipped-out nipple at the 2004 Superbowl began her career as a search engine hit.

The huge interest in her brother relates to a story that, technically, has a happy ending - his acquittal on charges of child abuse - but this still isn’t a No 6 entry he’d like to have: most of the traffic to sites featuring him will have been driven by prurient curiosity rather than celebration of his exoneration.

In effect, the Jackson Two are simply contemporary versions of previous occupants of the same slots: Janet takes over from Paris Hilton in the filthy video position, while Michael follows OJ Simpson as disgraced-but-cleared celebrity. This may be seen as a depressing comment on public interests, although an optimist might note that the Jacksons are respectively less filthy and less disgraced than their predecessors.

The fact that the clothes-phobic singer attracted more cyberspace traffic than Hurricane Katrina (in at No 2) or the Asian tsunami (No 3) has led some commentators to lament that the world is more interested in celebrity sex than human tragedy, but the statistic is more complicated than it seems. Relatively few people use the internet as their first source for a developing news story so the two weather catastrophes will have been followed on television networks and in newspapers with at least as great an intensity as that brought to Michael’s sister’s bits. And the majority of the internet’s users are looking for material that is not available from the mainstream media.

If the nightly network news regularly screened videos of naked singers or actresses having sex, Janet Jackson and Paris Hilton would not be the Elvises of the internet hit list. In the same way, large numbers of those accessing information about the hurricane and the tsunami online were looking for stuff that wasn’t in the bulletins: blogs, live video links, chatrooms. Given this, it’s quite reassuring that the two news stories didn’t finish above Ms Jackson as, frankly, they could only have done so with snuff videos.

This, though, is a small victory, confirming that most internet searches have a negative or malevolent intention. Britney Spears, for example, makes No 8 because of people looking for an explicit video that has never been posted and that she denies exists. Brad Pitt (5) and Angelina Jolie (9) attract attention not as actors but for the scandal and eccentricities of their relationship.

In this context, it’s refreshing that Harry Potter (10) appears to have made it entirely through innocent childish interest in his wizardry although, given the rest, you rather fear that some of the hits are from people who have heard that there’s a video out there of him and Hermione doing it.