WEBRING ~ Read Around the Rainbow ~ Weird Internet Searches ~ #RAtR

Addison Albright

4 years ago

Weird Internet Searches

Oh my. Where do I even start? Should we be worried about the scrutiny our Internet searches may or may not bring to us? I don’t know the official answers, but I do have a bit of personal experience to relate.

We all like to joke about our Internet searches, but is Big Brother truly watching? In real time? Or with our search words dropping us onto a security/watch list? Personally I’ve never really worried about potential agents monitoring my searches because I figured they’d be smart enough to work out for themselves whether or not I was an actual threat despite my Googling “how to take down a plane” (etc… I’ll list a few of my more *cough* interesting searches below).

The other concern—one that I hadn’t thought would ever, in a million years, be something I’d need to worry about—is the one that actually did come true for me.

By that, I mean…yep…the police confiscated my laptop for the purpose of looking through my search history.

Wait! WHAT!? But, but, Addison, we thought you were such a sweet and innocent ~~old bag~~ nice woman.

Don’t worry. This story shouldn’t affect that totally correct *cough* image.

Long story, short (and sad), almost a decade ago, my husband was dying of cancer, and he’d came to the conclusion that his quality of life with the pain and surgery/medication side effects had passed the tipping point where he no longer felt it was worth maximizing the time he had left. One terrible evening I came home from taking my mother out to lunch and a movie, and discovered him dead. Since he’d created a setup involving a helium tank, tubing, and a plastic bag, it was obvious at a glance that he hadn’t died of natural causes.

Despite both motive and appearance being that he’d died by his own hand, the police would have been remiss if they hadn’t investigated the possibility of foul play. I understood that and had no concerns in that regard.

Needless to say, both of our laptops were taken in and held for about a week. I remember looking back on that time and boggling at how I didn’t spend even a second stressing about my search history (and large m/m ebook collection) potentially being scrutinized and judged by midwestern (likely conservative-leaning) detectives. I’m fairly chill and pragmatic in general, but it helps that my brain was numb that week.

Ultimately, they found his research on how to create the setup he’d used on his laptop. They told me about it. They never said if they also looked at my laptop, and I never asked. I still occasionally wonder.

Heh…wonder if they looked, and if so, wonder what they thought.

ANYWAY! …

Here are a few of my more concerning searches:

What are possible ways to take down an airplane?
How long do dead bodies float in the ocean?
Specifically, how long do they float in the South Pacific, because as it turns out the answer varies based on water temperature, etc.
Historically, how long have people survived floating in the ocean?

…and some not-so-concerning-but-hopefully-still-interesting searches that would be less likely to send an agent’s eyebrows skyrocketing:

A spreadsheet’s worth of information on seaweed, and by golly, even though I didn’t go into those tedious facts on page, you better believe the characters I had marooned on an itty bitty island only ate the varieties that would actually be in season for each scene’s setting. Likewise for the tropical fruits.
Curvature of the Earth…how tall must a tree be to be seen from sea level (or slightly above sea level…say standing on the end of a wing of a downed plane) at various distances? I had to bust out some rusty math skills for that one. 😳 (And yeah…these nitpicky things are the kind of shit my perfectionist self insists be reasonably accurate even though the odds of most readers thinking twice about it is probably rather slim.)
Typical work schedules for first-year physician interns.
All kinds of stuff on pet mice.
Info on broken bones.
Info on drug addiction/dependency/etc.
Info on blood banks, specifically how much doesn’t end up getting used, and what happens to blood that was rejected or aged out?
Archaeology processes over time.
How long does it take various materials to degrade/break down?
All kinds of stuff about ancient societies.
How did ancient primitive societies handle bodily waste? Dental hygiene? Etc.
Forests in the Pacific Northwest. What grows/lives there?
Fun stories that tabloids print, and popular Bigfoot lore.
The chemical makeup of bodies, the percentages of different gasses in the air and what would that mass be in a particular volume/area, and the makeup of minerals found in the dust flying around in the air (because dammit, even though shifters are, of course, utter nonsense, the mass conversions in my story are gonna make some semblance of sense even if the biology/chemistry reactions must still be total BS).
Farming stuff (though hubs was still alive when I was writing the book where this was pertinent, and having grown up in rural Nebraska, he was able to answer many of my questions).
Dry, legal stuff regarding potential lawsuits.
What does the inside of a XXX video booth look like?
Charity fair/fund raiser activities.

…and that’s just the stuff I can remember off the top of my head, and not counting looking up the definitions for words I’ve been given for flash fiction and bonus scene prompts such as: horripilation, sciatica, politesse, prefestinate, and debacchate (I’m looking at YOU, Nell Iris! 🤣).

All kinds of brownie points to anyone who can match which of my various searches correlates to which books! 📚 Or feel free to ask if any of these searches piques your interest. 😂

Drop me a comment about some of your intriguing/worrisome/funny/etc Internet searches! 😁