1659 Tijuana Donkeys

I read recently that a whole new trove of information is being dug up in a branch of cultural anthropology. "Anthro-" as in mankind, "-pology" as in someone should be sorry for this. The place where the digging for treasure is taking place? Cyberspace.
This new information is made possible by the great search engines making available search data. Not intensive, track-back to your personally identifiable computer information—so they say— but anonymized data that reflects the searches requested by millions of browsers across the world. The very fact they coined the word anonymized should tell you something.
In any event, cultural anthropologists can look at the prevalence of a particular search term and make judgments about interest in a particular news item, or how that item may affect a given geographical region. It can also determine political trends and interpret demographics that include income or gender. Or whatever personal information you've ever filled out in any online survey or "private" profile field.
I've been conducting a similar survey into the tastes of the average internet seeker. Not long ago, noticing from the Google analytics for my blog that a particular essay had got a lot of hits, I decided to do an experiment. The term that had generated so much activity was "Naked." So I added the terms Naked, Nude, XXX, etc. to the subsequent titles of my commentaries. Internet rankings improved dramatically. Forget about search engine optimization. It was like search engine Viagra.
Recently I got the biggest daily hit rate of all time. It makes me wonder about the anthropology of internet surfers. The term that generated the hits was the title of an essay about barnacle reproduction—"Animal Sex."
Anthropology. Someone should be sorry indeed.
America, ya gotta love it.