Popping The Lid On Our Id

Dubliners are desperate for golf tips and, when those fail, for the twin consolations of Guinness and psychiatric treatment. Or so says Google, the all-knowing Internet search engine, which reports that residents of the Irish capital search for "golf tips" and "Guinness" more avidly than citizens of any other city on earth--and are second only to the people of St. Albans, England, in researching "psychiatrists" online.

Google knows what we're thinking because every day millions of us type into google.com our innermost dreams ( Dallas residents do the highest percentage of searches for "country club membership" in America), our best-kept secrets ( Portland shows the most interest in "jock itch") and our deepest desires ( Cincinnati, which had America's first professional baseball team, is now first in another category: downloading pictures of Anna Kournikova).

Google made all of this information public last month, when it launched Google Trends, at google.com/trends. Simply type in a search term, and you'll see which cities devoted the greatest percentage of their Google searches to that word or phrase, which is how we know that Krakow may have the world's worst collective case of "athlete's foot." That will please fast-actin' Tinactin pitchman John Madden, who has a home in Pleasanton, Calif., an Oakland suburb that happens to be the world's second-leading searcher of "jock itch" online.

What all of this gives us is nothing less than a spreadsheet of the earth's id--our most private impulses made manifest. What it provides fans is an entirely new abstract of the sports world. And I do mean world. The top four cities searching for photos of Kournikova are all in India, giving the subcontinent the planet's largest percentage of people who ogle on Google, a practice so rampant it should have its own gerund: Oogling.

Google Trends confirms which athletes really are global superstars ( David Beckham comes from London, plays in Madrid but is most avidly Googled in Caracas) and which only seem to be (the top eight cities searching Derek Jeter are all in New York's tristate area). Speaking of which, ground zero of Yankees hatred is not Boston but 240 miles north of there--in Bangor, Maine, which Googled " Yankees suck" more aggressively than any other municipality. ( Boston is behind eight other New England cities.)

With this voyeuristic tool we can now tell which city in the world has the most ailing recreational athletes: It is almost certainly Philadelphia, first in "sports hernia" inquiries, second in "groin pull" searches, fourth in "jockstraps," fifth in "Ben Gay," eighth in "jock itch" and ninth in "athlete's foot."

Conversely, Cambridge, Mass., and Providence are citadels of the sedentary: Both are in the top three internationally in searching for those twin icons of indolence, "fantasy baseball" and "donuts."

Some of the evidence on Google Trends is circumstantial. Portland leads the U.S. in searches for "marijuana," a fact not entirely attributable to their Trail Blazers. Miami, hometown of Jose Canseco, is the domestic leader in "steroids" searches (not to mention " Ferrari"). And long after Rafael Palmeiro's departure from the Orioles, Baltimore leads the nation in searches for "human growth hormone."

But other information is inescapably damning. Salt Lake City, clean-living capital of the U.S., leads the world in searches for "nude volleyball" as well as its inevitable by-products, "breast implants" and "mullets." (I know you're reading this, Salt Lake City, because you also lead in online searches for " Sports Illustrated.")

Denver is the earth's epicenter of "sports" searches, and Baton Rouge is the Athens of "tailgating." But on balance, St. Louis is the all-American sports city, leading the world in searches for "baseball" and "mom" and "God bless America." It leads, too, in such critical U.S. sports indices as "baseball cards," "baseball gloves," "bowling" and "beer," the last of which might explain why it also leads in "weight loss" inquiries.