Matt Richel writes for The New York Times today in an article on a new case where Google Trends may be introduced into evidence and set legal precedent.

In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like “orgy” than for “apple pie” or “watermelon.” The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics — and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm.

I have to severely disagree with his comparison of the two word search term “apple pie” with the one word term “orgy.” The difference in popularity for search is arguably not as meaningful as they might seem. The motivation seems more driven by the use the term “apple pie” as a gimmick in his argument than showing meaningful statistics. He should have used “group sex” against “apple pie” to make his strings consistent and rule out the slim possibility of people looking for the 90s band Orgy so that they can download their hit cover of “Blue Monday.”

But the real reason this caught my interest has to do with the search terms that most often bring people to my blog. A while back I wrote a blog where I mention tentacle rape. It’s is and continues to be the most popular page on my site via search engines. Here’s a quick summary from my Google Analytics showing the search terms that bring people to that entry as their landing page in the last month.

In the overall scheme of things, “gay tentacle rape” continues to be in my top three search terms for this entire site.

Should I blog more about gay tentacle rape?
Are you interested in gay tentacle rape?
How do you feel abou the abbrieviation GTR for “gay tentacle rape”?
Does the fact that people find my site while searching for “gay tentacle rape” mean that I am violating community standards?
Are search terms really an indicator pornographic of intention or do people just think it’s funny to Google gross things?
Are you interested in pix of AZNs doing GTR wearing alt bro moo moos?
Should I start ending all my posts with a series of questions and be more like HRO?

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