“The cruellest month” quote tops Google in April. Can you believe it? A poet is accidentally on top of the world!

The line appeared on Google’s aptly named Hot Trends list, a utility offered by the company that offers a glimpse of what the online nation is most furiously searching for at any given moment. Hot Trends is Google’s answer to the “most viewed” pages that have become a fixture on so many news and entertainment websites. Popularity is the web’s basic unit of currency now, a dynamic that works about as well as it did in high school. Chances are you know the names of the head-turning, eye-candy types—and have been unable to avoid the loud-mouthed troublemakers. As for the rest of us, sorry guys, if you’re not in the in crowd, you’re just…in the crowd.
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Even more confusing was the list of related searches listed alongside the Eliot line—meaning the other terms the same people were searching at around the same time. Among them were “melanite,” “bouzouki,” and the “cayenne, sugarloaf, red Spanish.” More googling revealed that the first is a black mineral, the second an Irish stringed instrument, and the last a trio of pineapple varieties. What any of these had to do with “The Waste Land,” however, was beyond my grasp.

That’s the funny thing about Hot Trends. Whereas popularity lists on other sites, like YouTube, MySpace, or cnn.com—are occupied by site-specific stories or video clips that people have already looked at, Google’s most-searched is by definition a list of what people do not yet know enough about.

And that gives rise to this strange new kind of popularity mystery, where even if somewhere, for some reason, something has caught on, it can be difficult to figure out why. We’re not used to this, any more – you should be able to find out anything on the Internet, anything.

Even –GASP– poetry?