I love checking out Google Labs. They’re always up to something. But the thing they’ve got cooking in there right now that I’m most excited about is Google Trends. Mark Morford has already had his firm-yet-supple hands all over it (popup warning), and my pal Viviane had to give it a few squeezes and spanks as well. I spent hours playing with it while in the Baltimore airport (occasionally looking up to watch security guards whiz by on Segways). It’s a pretty powerful feature, utilizing Google’s data to return location-based results on search data. You can search worldwide results, or narrow it down to region. It’s not entirely precise, but it’s still a great way of taking a search term snapshot.

So, naturally, the thing to do is search for sex. But that’s a reflex, like how when you see someone yawn, you have to yawn really bad too. But I didn’t really care who searched for sex where — sex as a search term isn’t specific enough to show me something new; sex also has many meanings. I wanted to know specifics, so I tested the water plugging in “anal sex” and discovered that the top city in the world searching for anal sex is Ankara, Turkey and the top region is Saudi Arabia, and the top language it’s searched for in is Arabic. Now technically Turkey doesn’t have any statutes, penalties or restrictions on sodomy, but most of the population is Muslim, a religion that prohibits sodomy and considers it a deviant act; extremists only differ in their opinion on the preferred method for killing homosexuals and those who engage in this “deviant behavior”. In Saudi Arabia, the penalty for sodomy is death. They just fucking kill you.

Next I plugged in “fetish” to see what would come up, and I wasn’t shocked to see that the United Kingdom had the top city and top region — after all, the UK is the epicenter for fetish culture and fashion in many ways, and they’ve long had a reputation for ponygirls and rubber-enclosure-suit-in-the-countryside frolics. No one knows why, it’s just a fact, like how Bill O’Reilly is a douchebag and no one knows why but it just is, and everyone just goes about their business. What surprised me with the fetish search was that the next country/language on the list was Italy/Italian. What’s up, Germany? Yo, Japan. Y’all are slipping. Maybe it’s pope related; catholics are all into ritual and robes and fetish is very ritualistic.

I had to search “oral sex“. And at the top was… Romania? OMG — vampires! Hott. This all makes Romania look like my next vacation destination. Next on the list was India, where 80% of the population is Hindu. Kama Sutra, indeed.

But I couldn’t just be satisfied with straight-up seraches; Google Trends lets you compare searches to see what comes up the most and where. So I did all three (as an example, I actually did dozens). It’s really fun, but now I have an idea that I have no clue how I’d make it happen, but I want to do a mashup of Google Trends and Google Maps, to trendmap the world. I’d love to see the Trends data on my sex searches (and even more specific ones) mapped. I think it would look really cool and be absolutely fascinating, especially because the map data would change a bit every time, breathing, as it were. I also had a fantasy of somewhat reverse-engineering the Trends searches, so I could see what the most popular sex searches are on a map so I could see popular searches on a map without plugging in my own (possibly restrictive) search terms.

Cool stuff.

Update: Viviane had more fun with Google Trends and specific sex searches — check it out.