If you like watching what the world is searching for, search spies (programs that output the searches that are being performed on the site in real time) are a fun resource. Over at SEOChat, Mick's asked the question and Jammer & Skipsel have provided very nice lists. There's quite a few:
- UK Sprite
- Dogpile (unfiltered & filtered)
- Excite (also filtered & unfiltered)
- Infotiger (never heard of them)
- Search Engine in the Netherlands - top searches from past 30 days
- Ilectric
- Fireball (auf Deutsch)
- Zoekspion (Netherlands)
- Kobala (more from the Dutch)
- Splat Search (random queries)
- WebCrawler
- Jeeves IQ (Interesting Queries)
- https://hot.aol.com/hot/hot (Hot at AOL)
- Metacrawler (filtered and unfiltered)
- Search.com (top 1000)
- Ozsearch (Internet Guide)
- Dip Box
- Abacho (in German)
- Verizon
Great list, guys. A scraper could sure have fun with this.
I notice that a lot of them hust have a list of terms and are just repeating the same ones at randon times. They are supposed to look like recent searches but looking at my own search engines and comparing those there is no way they are real recent searches.
Some of them are quite good though.
I had my reasons for asking the question and it led to me watching them all for about 3 hours each and i notice that the german ones are laden with porn terms so be careful and i notice splat search just spits out a random set of real estate terms repeated and randomised.
The ussprite one seemes to be the best for actually showing searches but i also suspect that one is on a loop and goes back to the start as well.