Do search terms wanna be free?
Do search terms wanna be free? I think they do.
Today, for work, I needed to search through the top 1,000 or so search terms for 2002-2005.
But I couldn’t. It appears none of the major search engine services have placed this basic data in the public domain.
Google’s Zeitgeist is cute, but it’s near useless as a research tool. Yahoo! Buzz tries even harder to amuse, but lacks even an archive of its own cuteness.
Perhaps, both companies do provide access to this valuable data — to private customers. Call me naive or call me a Child of the 90s, but, I feel this recording of our collective wants and curiosities should be readily available to anyone, be they a marketer or a pundit, a cogntive psychologist or an artist.
If who we are is what we Google, then anyone and everyone should be able to determine what a given people were searching for at a given time and in a given place.
The Oracle of Google may very well be around for the next 1,000 years. We should begin disseminating his/her/its cryptic wisdom now so there are plenty of copies around for the next civilization to inherit.