Sexy Information: Google’s Top Keyword Searches

“ 93% of online experiences begin with a search engine.”

Source: Forrester Research

When people sit down (or stare at their mobile) to begin their online experiences, what are they looking for?

Back in 2010 when I first broached this topic with Google’s Keyword Tool (the old name for today’s Keyword Planner), we found many adult terms lining the top searches on the Internet. While the top online brands were dominating the inventory at the top, (“facebook,” the #1 search term was sought out more than 1.6 billion times a month, “youtube” had grown to 618 million searches a month and “hotmail” was over a quarter billion times a month) the #1 topic searched was “porn.” And if you think about it even more, it may have been the #1 search as well in true terms because most of the searches for “facebook,” or “hotmail” were more likely navigational searches or commands on a browser.

The numbers only grew.

“Porno,” “Porn,” and “xxx” had doubled in volume from 2012 to 2014 when we updated the survey.

We even postulated that it was the most sought out topic that year:

However, we redid our survey with less “adult” focused phrases and stripped out the “sexy” terms and looked for what parents would want to know.

2017’s Top Google Searches: Most Searched Keywords on the Internet

Instead of showing how “pornhub” or other top porn sites would dominate the adult brand searches, we decided to omit them and look for the more pg-13 or so topics. We found that maybe people were looking for “how to get speak sexy.” People had searched 226 million times a month for “translate.”

(note: “pornhub” is searched more than “translate”)

Despite the world’s fascination for what Maslow had always said was true about our primal instincts, people do search for many other reference phrases like:

If you’re curious if people are still searching about whether people are as primal as ever, feel free to comment or ask us to publish the rest of 2017’s data.

Until then, we’ll be working on the nexxxt edition of our “top google keywords study.”