Of course now that I made the giant proclamation that I will not be blogging here for a while, I have something I desperately need to get off my chest…

In my constant quest to fine-tune my SEO skills, I have been taking a course in the subject on Lynda.com. At one point in the video course the instructor talks about the value of the auto-fill option in many search engines (namely Google) for generating additional keyword ideas, which are of course based on popularity of search terms.

So I thought it would be interesting to use the Auto-Fill as a sort of seer/oracle–to look into the feeling of the times through whatever automatic text appears after a given word or pair of words. I got some interesting data as a result.

“No jobs in” yields: “No jobs in Michigan,” “No jobs in California,” “No jobs in Portland,” “No jobs in San Diego” and “No jobs in Arizona,” and “No jobs in Florida.”

“Hard to meet people” yields: “Hard to meet people in Los Angeles”

“Best city for singles” yields: “Best city for singles Austin”

“Obama is” yields: “Obama is the Antichrist,” “Obama is a socialist,” “Obama is Irish” and “Obama is not black” among other things.

“America is” yields: “America is the heart,” “America is doomed,” “America is dying,” “America is a melting pot,” “America is not the world,” and “America is fat.”

“The solution is” yields: “The solution is offline” and “The solution is simple”

“Invest in” yields: “Invest in gold,” “Invest in America,” “Invest in bonds,” “Invest in silver,” among others (like the stupid, “Invest in oil”)

“Your destiny” yields: “Your destiny is to merge with infinity,” and “Your destiny is coming.”

I will leave you with that last chilling one.

Posted by Shana Ting Lipton