I’m not really the person to bother to stay particularly up to date on the happenings on the internet, so for all I know, this might be old news, but a few days ago I rediscovered the joy of Mystery Google. Almost. The concept is simple and wonderful enough. It looks like Google, you type in your search term like in Google, except the results you get are what the person before you searched for. It’s a great concept, and I rather like it because if you keep using it for ten minutes or so, you notice enough trends and actually walk away with a rather naked glimpse at humanity.

I first discovered Mystery Google about a month or two ago, and typed in those normal, silly searches you used the first time someone told you about Google, like “hello”, and “funny”. Then when you get the search results for things like “<O.O>”, you realize that what’s even more fun that getting the previous person’s results is that the next person gets yours. Naturally, I typed in things like “the inescapable futility of existence” (and did some shameless self-advertising by searching for this blog), but lost interest pretty quickly, without paying much attention to what I was getting.

A few days ago, being the good college students that we are, we were messing around with Mystery Google, and this is when I started to really pay attention to what other people were searching for. For every handful of search terms most likely done by people showing Mystery Google to their friends and pissing them off with things like “Mary likes monkey balls”, we got the occasional “You are a good person.” Briefly motivated by this, we decided to try our hand at setting up positive searches for people too. We typed in “People need you.” We got search results for “edward cullen doggy style”. This was short lived.

So I guess you can kind of learn a few things about people from things like Mystery Google. People enjoy making fun of other people, occasionally inspiring them, and hot fictitious vampire sex.

Enlightening!