50 Common Words with Wacky Google Results

I was trying to figure out how much a bucket cost earlier this week, and googled “bucket” to find out.  I was surprised to discover that anything remotely useful didn’t show up in the first few results.  So, in some bizarre method of either wasting hours of my life or providing complementary services to the SEO folks out there, I went looking for other common, everyday words who had similarly weird results in Google.  This list is not in order of wackiness (but I did consult this list for help).

1. Bucket.  Some “real” results, but otherwise dominated by Photobucket, a movie, and other miscellaneous non-buckety stuff.  Nothing as cool as the results for spatula either.
2. Word.  Completely dominated by MS Word, or products that in some way augment MS Word.
3. Thing. After a comic book, the next few entries Google showed me asked me if I really meant “thong”. Well, I do now!
4. Seven. The only single-digit number whose top results had nothing to do with numbers.
5. Live. All MSN, all the time.
6. Stop. All sorts of goofiness, the highlight being a link to sign up in order to help stop alien abductions. I do not lie.
7. Run. Nothing super-wrong about the results, but they’re all over the map.
8. Sea. Instead of a picture of the ocean, the top result is a convenient map showing you where the Seattle-Tacoma Airport is located.  Just in case.
9. Saw. (get it? sea-saw?) While these aren’t inaccurate results, I most certainly pity the squeamish individual who is innocently looking to pick up a woodworking tool.
10. City. I’d like to applaud the City of Chicago for being the number one city!
11. Country. Yeesh, not only isn’t there a country at the top of the list, it’s dominated by country music.
12. Sad. Nothing out of the ordinary for “happy”, but sad was really sad.
13. Dirt. Another one dominated by movies & TV.
14. Table.  Great for people looking for some HTML advice. Awful for the other 99.8% of humans.
15. Bug. (yeah, I’m cheating here) Top results include the animated film and Bug Labs.  Cool to me, probably would confuse some of my relatives though.  🙂
16. Apple. Not a fruit-related link in sight.
17. Orange. While incomparable to the previous entry, it too is at risk for scurvy.
18. House. Mostly TV shows and a little government to “mix it up” a bit.
19. Plasma. I only included this one because it was surprising how few of the first results were about plasma TVs. Go fgure.
20. Lamp. Way out there.  Even the Latin American Microform Project beats out a nice table lamp!
21. First. Then again, I doubt anyone would be interested in the word first contextually anyway.
22. Remote.  Results are quite poor for the outdoorsy users.
23. Well. A couple of entries for a poor place for babies to play, but a bank manages to top the list.
24. String. Ah, I see that luxury knitting yarns did eke out super string theory, but these were both buried beneath programming terms.
25. Chip. No silicon or potato references on page one!
26. Ball. Results show that high society is not very good at SEO.
27. Angel. Ditto for religion!
28. Force. In a slight twist, I’d like to applaud the Internet for only 2 of the top 10 results having a Star Wars tie-in.
29. Falcon. If it weren’t for a Wikipedia entry you’d never even know about the bird.
30. Owl. Similarly suffering from a lack of ornithology enthusiasts.
31. Small. The only small thing here is the number of results about small things. Bah-dum, ching!  Don’t forget to tip your waiter!
32. Big. Insert some Biggie Smalls reference here (it ties the two lines together so nicely).
33. Wall. Clearly the people in Wall Township were tired of losing traffic to their home page.
34. Star. Another example where the geeks are just disappointing us all.
35. Smart. Well, the results aren’t…
36. Dumb. After losing quite a few minutes to some of these, I figured I’d include it to share the painlove.
37. Sharp. Lots of consumer electronics, not much about knives.
38. Girl. Exactly as one would expect, a link to a skateboarding company.
39. School. A coup for the Montgomery County Public School system. A big fail for anyone not from Rockville, MD.
40. Robert. Amazingly this no longer goes straight to the Scobleizer himself.
41. Pop.  I think this effectively ends the pop vs soda debate.
42. Bowl. Very understandable results, placing lingerie well above ceramics.
43. Cake. Not terribly abnormal, but I really wasn’t expecting a stock quote that was highly contextual to my interest in a tasty dessert.
44. Store. A highly arbitrary list of retailers.
45. Trend. I guess anyone on top of the trends probably isn’t googling this one too often.
46. Ego. Even paintball products managed to place themselves above any of the “a-list bloggers”… 😉
47. Past. In a dismal sign for smart people everywhere, google assumed I meant “PSAT” and then provided me with lots of resources to do a better job on the exam.
48. Bail. Seems to be missing links to rich bankers and/or automakers.
49. Toe. No links to me or my Dad, whatsoever.
50. Failure.  I was quite disappointed to find that failure no longer linked to Bush’s bio.  Not to worry, I think we all know it pretty well anyway…

So what’s the point, you might wonder?  I didn’t really have a “deep mission” here to uncover some secrets of the universe, but it was interesting nonetheless (especially since I googled at least another hundred or so “common” words to find the results above).  As we continue down the path of defining our world more and more by what we find with a simple google search, I hope we don’t every end up putting too much faith in the almighty from Mountain View.  Google search, as I’ve discussed before, is not “reality” and it’s cleary not a digital reflection of the world we live in.  If it was, bucket makes, models, vendors, and pricing would’ve been much more prevalent than some mediocre movie.