I was auditing what was showing up at the top for the search “most searched words” on google earlier today and was blown away that a posting by a website called herbeat.com was #1 with a list of 5 terms that are definitely NOT the “most searched words” on google, the internet or anywhere.
It had ZERO reasoning or logic behind its’ list. It just talked about the 5 phrases as if it was obvious that these would be intuitively the most searched phrases online and if you search through google and look for seo experts in omaha you’ll have a list of the top seo’s to contact. In this day and age, there are just too many tools to effectively find the REAL LIST of Top Searches Online like we have, but it’s mind boggling that google would even give this site credit and the traffic it does NOT deserve.
What are you thinking google?
The site was proposing that the top 5 were:
- Martini
- Oprah
- William Shakespeare
- Michael Jordan
- Dog
In fact, these phrases are NOT even close to the top. The number of searches these each garner monthly actually are:
- Martini – 201,000 average monthly searches
- Oprah – 201,000 average monthly searches
- William Shakespeare – 550,000 average monthly searches
- Michael Jordan – 1,220,000 average monthly searches
- Dog – 1,220,000 average monthly searchees
As you can see in post about the ACTUAL “top searched words” on google in 2014 (and basically now), to even enter the top 115, you need to have at least 16.6 million searches a month to qualify. 
Given that these have volumes over 15 million below this, these are obviously NOT the top searched words on the Internet, Google or elsewhere. Even if we were to aggregate all the “like terms”, the most searched term here would be “dog” with all the permutations possibly totalling a little over 9.9 million searches. However, if you use this same logic with any of the Top 100+ searches I spent many hours, if not days and weeks manually calculating, these other “top searches” would equate to MUCH LARGER numbers and squash these 5 terms this website was able to manipulate itself into google and be #1.
Google definitely befuddles me at times when it allows searches like this rise to the top. At the same time, I’m grateful because it also makes me frustrated enough to actually do the real research needed and the legwork to find the true answer to this all important question: What are (really) the most searched terms?
And as Britney Jacobs from the San Diego SEO office so insightfully pointed out, “porn would definitwly be in there.” Ms. Jacobs is not only 110% correct, but the term garnered by itself 124,000,000 monthly average searches and sits in #16 in our most searched words survey growing more than double since 2012 and it’s sister phrase “porno” actually obtains even more monthly average searches at 151 million a month by itself. Again, do note there are many other similar phrases that would boost these phrases up which would easily trounce the “top 5 phrases” this silly website that hopefully won’t sit on top of the search engine results page for this search for long.
Top 5 Searched Topics
Even if you argue the other phrases are not even “searches” because they are websites on our survey (and we acknowledge this little issue with the search data that Google ironically provides) and people navigate to them with the letters or shorter forms of the words in a search box of some sorts, we can still sort through the larger list to find that th most searched topics are:
- porno
- porn
- xxx
- translate
- maps
We’ll be soon publishing the 6th through the 100+ topics as well to make sure everyone is satisfied with what they think are the Top 100 Searches – whether they are websites or topics.
**Research has all been conducted on Google’s Keyword Planner tool and the “exact match search” volumes are what are presented here for the comparisons.
***We also realize the result could be localized to reflect what people believe here when I was searching. I was making the search from Hong Kong and using google.com.hk since that’s what defaults to the browser here. At the same time, google’s mission is to provide “relevant results” and not spammy ones like this one. The list is obviously a poor list that just somewhat manipulated its way up. This is definitely NOT why I entered this industry.
