Google came throwing searchable data at humans at the same velocity as people were throwing searches for "funny cats" and "what is a hemorrhoid" into its search bar. The amount of knowledge in our hands is endless, but as the old saying goes, "We don't care. We just want to see funny cat memes."
I bet a lot of you don't know just how powerful Google really is, or how to properly search for things. To most, it's like looking at data in an Excel spreadsheet. You have little to no idea what you're looking at, and if you do know what you're looking at, you do not know how to change anything in it. Hence, this births a lot of interesting searches produced by people (or cats, if you had a cat crawl across your keyboard and hit "search"). A lot of exacting phrases like "That girl that was in the window in that one scene of the western movie that had the guy with the beard in it."
[The film was Django Unchained, and the girl was Amber Tamblyn, who also portrayed a doctor-in-training on the show House]
What’s funny is that Google is tracking this data and everything else in the world. We have provided billions of search result babies to Google, and it eats them up like a can of sardines and says, "More, please!"
So, you might as well roll over and take what joy you can out of this. If that means learning absolutely nothing useful each day and simply looking up cat memes...enjoy! By all means, whatever gets you through this disgusting day—which is why I took it upon myself to try to make your day a little less gloomy by going into "Google Trends." Google Trends is pretty much like Googling Google. It gives you some fun insight into how popular searches are and where they were most reviewed. I could write many articles on this theme, and I may revisit this topic in the future. For now, I wanted to focus on memes. So, let's see what people were looking for when the word "meme" was involved in the search (from 2020-2024):
Girl Explaining Mansplaining Meme – An oldie but a goodie. I do love that this is still relevant today!
Cat Smurf Meme – I have no idea what anything is anymore, and this just gets included with this fact. Somewhere in The District of Columbia and Nevada in October of 2023, this thing was created. I have no intention of being baited into clicking on any references to this, for fear that Google will start sending me ads for "Cat Smurf Meme" memorabilia...
Ant With Bag Meme – This one was just a picture of some cartoon ant holding what appeared to be a hobo sack on a stick. It wasn’t that funny, and I don’t understand why people searched for this. But then again, I don’t know why people search for most of these things.
Blinking White Guy Meme – The story behind this one is actually pretty funny, considering that, like most people who have memes made out of them, he had no idea it had happened until much later. He also did not recall making this face after a friend on his show made the statement, ''Doing some farming with my hoe here," while playing a video game.
The What Meme – This ad for a carpet cleaner was able to somehow provide the cringiest smiling woman I've seen on any ad—prior or since—which is what makes her expression for "WHAT" so perfect. We've all been there and had that moment. Especially when we're just shampooing the carpet and realize that the carpet you’re standing on could have been shampooed previously by a cleaning specialist before you moved in, who was called to clean up the brain and blood residue from a murder.
Grimace Shake Meme – This one gets a little terrifying because the thing being portrayed is—in itself—the very essence of nightmare fuel.
I have to say...I was a bit disappointed in what I found out after all this research. I really did put about four solid hours worth of work trying to find something unique here. I think what I got out of all of this is that we crave nostalgia and that new things like the "Cat Smurf Meme" won't last. Grimace and the Carpet Cleaner Lady™ will probably outlive us all—just like diabetes.
[I respect Wilford Brimley too much to put him in this article without permission, so enjoy a cat-lookalike meme]
Assuming that this doesn't already take up a solid two pages of meme photos, here are some honorable mentions of searches (in no particular order of importance, and I won't dignify with a timeline...)
These were things people actually typed into a search bar at some point:
"The Bible's main protagonist"
"Crossword instructions"
The phrase “hospital” occurs most frequently in the morning.
"How often do you think about the Roman Empire?"
"Why do people in Portland, Oregon watch The Golden Bachelor?" (this deserves a "what'" meme)
"Who is God" (right by "Who is Jesus," after they searched for "The Bible's main protagonist")
Lemonade Diet Recipe (eye roll...)
Aspergers symptoms
Hotmail (I love this because it doesn’t even exist any longer, but people are nostalgic, still have a Hotmail email, and Hotmail.com simply leads to "Outlook.")
I was glad to find out that after all this time with the internet being around, some people still don't quite understand religion or their public speakers (aka Jesus) and that some things like diabetes, shampooing carpets, and posting questions in the wrong forums or websites, will never change. Just look at this question posted in 2015 from Molly:
Hannah One Cup can be found trying not to mimic the blinking white guy, but is failing miserably, and now everyone thinks she either has constant seizures or is just always surprised by what people have to say (it's the latter). She can be found on Facebook by her name, or TikTok (until no longer available?) at (@thursdaynight_depression).
