ONLY THE LONELY?

Interesting snippet in the news this week, courtesy of CNN (full article here): Google: Irish the Web's loneliest users Ireland may be enjoying stellar economic growth and seen as one of the best places in the world to live, but its inhabitants are apparently also the globe's loneliest. Google Trends, which works out how many searches have been done via the Internet search engine on particular terms, showed the word "lonely" was entered most frequently by Internet users in Ireland: http://www.google.com/trends?qlonely. The Irish, enjoying new-found wealth and a flood of immigration following more than a century of economic decline, are followed in the misery stakes by residents of Singapore and New Zealand -- although Singaporeans are the most frequent searchers of "happiness." Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for a given term coming from each city, region or language divided by total Google searches coming from the same area. Ireland's capital, Dublin, topped the city list for "lonely" searches, followed by Melbourne, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand. Personally, I'm not entirely sure how entering "lonely" in the search field translates into being the Irish being the loneliest people. In any case, if that is how its gonna be taken, I think its even more scary that Singaporeans seemingly in search of happiness are expecting it to find it on Google. I mean, I love Google and everything but er... Art