I just found this, via reddit: Google Trends: search on sex & God.

Pretty interesting stuff. The long and short of it is that the top 10 countries by search for “god” on google are all western democracies (the top 10 cities were American), and the top ten cities in the world that search for “sex” on google are all Muslim autocracies (or dictatorships). Interesting isn’t it? I think one might have expected to see the American cities in the top 10 list for “sex” because it’s a common perception that our culture is sex-saturated (I tend to agree with that perception and am thusly suprised by these Google Trends results).

The conclusions one might draw from this are completely speculation, but here are some tidbits (some of which came from Vidhyut’s Nuggets:

1. India and the Philippines are on both lists. I think it reasonable to discount India because they are actually the most populous (by a long shot) nation that has unfettered access to the internet. There are probably as many people from India searching for either “sex” or “god” as the total number of people online in the U.S. The Philippines are another story though – they aren’t as highly populated. It’s a muslim country which would lend itself to searching for information about “god”, but why so much “sex”? One might suppose that because the Philippines is one of the most open and representative states that the traditional mores normally imposed by an Islamic state are not as strong or not present. One might also suppose that such openness would allow easy and legal creation and distribution of sexually-oriented materials.

2. Searches for “god” was dominated by western nations, including the United States. You might infer from this that Americans (and other westerners) are more religious than other peoples, but you might infer that simply means that more Americans are soul-searchers or looking for some meaning to their existence where others aren’t. It might be some of both, but one thing to remember is that these trends don’t tell you anything about oppression of free speech which might prevent religous sites from making it through governmental filters, or a simple lack of internet access.

Anyway, all very interesting stuff to ponder.