Lisbon Blog

Nowadays our linguistic landscape is getting more and more marked by the most modern words and terms. Not only words like “the international financial crisis” are fashionable, but as well the most bizarre ones which even our grandmother uses in her daily speech. The former “I’ll call you later” has been transformed into a “Hey, let’s skype this afternoon, ok?”. Meanwhile the so called hot buttons are flooding our television programme with game shows presented by scantily-clad beautiful women or hyperactive men. Nowadays, we spend all day long downloading programmes, or making backups of our computer systems. And don’t get frightened when you see a hysterical person screaming “Oh my god, they’ve Googled me”. Welcome to the 21st century!

The Google imperium isn’t just the most used searching engine within the cyber world, but it also gives us very useful information about different cultures and behaviours of the many countries spread out through the whole planet. Yet for a long time Google offers a special function for investigating the most searched words, divided into different categories, countries, regions and time periods. Therefore, marketing experts and trend analysts can enjoy a new successful instrument for adapting their strategies to the actual society.

But those results can also be very interesting and entertaining for us normal people out there in cyberspace. Hence we can see that “sex” is the most searched word worldwide. Well, that’s not very unusual, but what is curious is that in super Islamic countries like Pakistan (first place on the ranking), Bangladesh (3rd), Egypt (8th) or Sudan (9th) they are searching most for this word. So it seems to be that despite their religious restrictions, everyone is just dying to get jiggy with it! Other curious questions are why the German chancellor “Angela Merkel” is being most searched in the autonomous regions of Palestine, or why most of the fans of “Angelina Jolie” apparently live in Georgia, Albania and Macedonia. The year is almost over and so Google will soon publish the list of the most searched words of 2009. Come on, undoubtedly you already have an idea of some possible terms on the list, right? Michael Jackson, financial crisis, Obama, swine flu…and, of course, sex!

Google is so in fashion, that we use it as an appropriate verb ‘to google’. Even a Swedish child was given the name “Kai Google”. The first “google kid” is already 4 years old, but we still don’t know if it has a younger brother called Ebay or a little sister with the name Youtube. Well, that would be too exaggerated and the parents would have serious legal problems for giving their children such strange names.

Whether they are the newest internet technologies or not: to be honest, we all could live very happily without the World Wide Web. What about a trip to the impressive Portuguese capital which offers you an incredible culture and an enchanting atmosphere? Rent the best apartments in Lisbon and enjoy cheap and comfortable accommodation.