I just don’t believe it.  Pornography is not the most popular thing searched for on the internet.

This is according to Google’s new search analysis tool, Insights.  More Australians use the web to find games than adult content.  The top Australian search terms so far this year are: "games", "youtube", "myspace", "ebay", "google", "facebook", "weather", "hotmail", "yahoo" and "real estate".

The tool allows you to narrow down search statistics by country, region, city, etc, by date range and by areas of interest, such as travel or sports.  For example, web searches including the terms "art" and "politics" are popular in the Northern Territory and Tasmania – but only "politics" is of interest in the ACT, where those for "art" trail every other region.  Google searches for "news" are most popular in the Northern Territory and Western Australia, while those for "shoes" usually come from Victoria (Kelley must have been googling plenty).

Some other interesting things to note:

• Queenslanders and New South Welshmen are the pornhounds of Australia – searches for "porn" are most popular in Queensland and New South Wales and least popular in Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• "news" is a more popular search term than "porn" only in the ACT, Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
• Facebook is currently searched-for more often in the ACT and NT, while MySpace dominates everywhere else.
• Australia is leading the world for searches on "purple monkey dishwasher"

Must go and check up on that last one.