WikiLeaks
To be unaware of WikiLeaks you would have to have had your head buried firmly in the sand for the entirety of this month. WikiLeaks has been the hot news topic for weeks. WikiLeaks is the news story about which everybody has an opinion. WikiLeaks has become inescapable since the radical website, which claims to offer a safety haven for all whistleblowers, made around 250,000 classified U.S. diplomatic cables publicly available over the past month.
At the heart of the WikiLeak’s organisations ethos is a firm belief in the right to freedom of information; but currently, it is information on WikiLeaks itself is which is in great demand. Indeed, the notoriety of the now ubiquitous radical online organisation has grown to such a degree that the term “WikiLeaks” has overtaken the term “gambling” in numbers of Google search results.
To explain, typing the search term “WikiLeaks” into the Google search engine presently produces around 154 million results: a massive amount of results. In contrast, the search term “gambling” produces 44 million results. Admittedly, this is still very high, yet even those large results figures are dwarfed by WikiLeaks’.
Google searches, and the number of results, they return, can indicate a great deal about public interest, and WikiLeaks, rather than gambling, certainly seems to be the current focus of many people’s attention.
For example, the search term “Poker” garners 121 million results, “Casinos” return 27 million, while “Blackjack” returns 17 million. Less broad terms narrow the scope of the search and, consequently, return even less results: “online betting,” “online gambling,” and “online casinos,” for example, return a considerably lower 1.7, 4, and 8 million results, respectively.
A narrower WikiLeaks-related search — “Julian Assange,” the Australian founder of WikiLeaks, for example –still produces a massive 68 million results: only two million less than US President Barack Obama and considerably more than Secretary of State Hilary Clinton (21 million results).
