Cnn prom dress
Google Trends and the ghost of T.S. Eliot
“April is the cruelest month.” Yes, even in May.
Last Friday morning, the opening line of “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot’s most famous poem, became one of most explosively googled phrases in America. (Eliot spelled “cruellest” with two L’s, but I’m all in favor of editing poets for brevity.)
The line appeared on Google’s aptly named Hot Trends list, a utility offered by the company that offers a glimpse of what the online nation is most furiously searching for at any given moment. Hot Trends is Google’s answer to the “most viewed” pages that have become a fixture on so many news and entertainment websites. Popularity is the web’s basic unit of currency now, a dynamic that works about as well as it did in high school. Chances are you know the names of the head-turning, eye-candy typesand have been unable to avoid the loud-mouthed troublemakers. As for the rest of us, sorry guys, if you’re not in the in crowd, you’re just…in the crowd.
Hot Trends is just such a popularity contest. As I write this, a few of the top ten phrases are “american gladiators,” “suge knight knocked out,” “skimpy prom dress” and “florida fires.” Jocks, violence, prom queens and firefailsafe ways to make sure everyone knows who you are.
So imagine my surprise when something as bookish, stuffy and uncool as a line from Modernist poetry popped up on Hot Trends in one concentrated burst. It was more than surprise, actuallyit was bafflement: what could explain a hike large enough to beat a field of popular searches that included “bikini-wearing teacher,” and “hulk hogan’s son?”
I searched for the Eliot phrase in hopes of finding the answer, but ironically, Google was of little help. All it turned up were a few links to the text of the poem, and a long list of news stories from April that had invoked the month’s legendarily clichéd cruelty to describe gas prices, General Motors’ stock performance, taxes, and Seattle Mariner Richie Sexon’s batting average. But this was May 9th, and the most recent of those stories was over a week oldwhatever inspired people to start googling the phrase, it had had to have happened within the last few hours.
Even more confusing was the list of related searches listed alongside the Eliot linemeaning the other terms the same people were searching at around the same time. Among them were “melanite,” “bouzouki,” and the “cayenne, sugarloaf, red Spanish.” More googling revealed that the first is a black mineral, the second an Irish stringed instrument, and the last a trio of pineapple varieties. What any of these had to do with “The Waste Land,” however, was beyond my grasp.
That’s the funny thing about Hot Trends. Whereas popularity lists on other sites, like YouTube, MySpace, or cnn.comare occupied by site-specific stories or video clips that people have already looked at, Google’s most-sea
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