Each week, I check a report that shows me how many people are viewing my blog posts. Almost every week, the most popular post is one that I wrote back in 2005 with the title, “My ex put naked photos of me on the Web.” Seriously? That means that people are looking for “naked photos” via search engines, and they happened to run across my entry. I’m sure that these people are disappointed when they click through and don’t actually see skin pics.

With this in mind, I find it very interesting (and quite hard to believe) that the word “stock” was searched more often on Google China in 2007 than the word “sex.”  However, according to a Reuters’ story, this is exactly what happened.

Here’s a snippet from the article on Reuters:

The names of three banks [China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China Construction Bank ranked second, third and sixth] and the word “stocks” beat “sex” to become four of the most Googled words in China last year, according to a Google China list.

At number 1 was “QQ”, a Chinese instant message service and a brand of car.

The China Daily acknowledges that the word “sex” is the most frequently searched word on Google in other countries. That would help explain the popularity of my aforementioned “naked photos” post. So, why isn’t China as sex-crazed as the rest of the world?

China keeps a tight rein on Internet content and has launched several campaigns to root out online pornography, perhaps one reason why “sex” did not score so well.

Okay, so maybe China isn’t as innocent as these Google results would leave one to believe. Maybe if we crack down on online pornography in the United States, our (trackable) obsession with sex will decrease as well. Thoughts?