Online Oddities: Fact or Fiction Edition

W's AOL search records, orangutan dating site, Firefox crop circles, and Microsoft on LSD. Chalk these incongruent pairings up for what makes this week in August 2006, the best online week ever.

Slate continues the Web's latest fascination, mining the inner sanctum of AOLers, by relating the search history of User 16006693, or as we like to call him, "W." Showing an inordinate fascination with free Oakridge Boys downloads and jokes about Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, but not George Bush, dagnab it, W. seeks to discover the whereabouts of Iraq and Lebanon, information about "shee-ites," and property in Crawford, Texas that isn't next to Cindy Sheehan. Our personal favorite searches are for "how to run country when not really inerested" and how to resist the temptation of searching for disrobed rice. We assume the lower-case "r" is intentional. In case you haven't figured it out yet, User 16006693 Wall Street Journal quantified the leaked AOL data to reveal that over 17 million separate searches (out of 20 million) involved the search for something "free." Free was followed by "new," "lyrics," "county," "school," "city," "home," "state," "pictures," "music," "sale," "high," "map," "center," and a three letter word that starts in "s" and ends with "x." But it may not be the demographic you're thinking in regards to that last word (stereotyper!). AOL searches for Pamela Anderson were second to searches for Fall Out Boy suicidal punk rocker online dating site to aid them in propagating their species.

Poles Show Approval of Microsoft's LSD Use

A band of Polish security researchers, known as LSD, have been given free reign to try and send Windows Vista on a bad trip. The four hackers were recently put onFirefox logo crop circle. The publicity stunt (it worked, by the way) was in celebration of a milestone 200 million downloads of Microsoft's largest Web browser competitor. Well, that's the official version. But as always, you should trust no one. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Yahoo! My Web | Furl Bookmark Murdok: