Why is the question “What is Justin Bieber's phone number?” so popular?

Type in What is Justin Bieber's phone number? into Google and you’ll come up with 5,640,000 results. Look at the question and answer sites like Yahoo Answers or Webanswers and you’ll see this question pop up periodically, and also have the most views; this type of question seems to be trivializing the internet, making it into a pop-culture driven instrument.

Type in ‘what is the Pope's phone number’ and you only get 672,000 results, showing how pop culture is more important than God – didn’t John Lennon get castigated for saying something to that effect?

While it’s going to take a while for anything to happen, the increase of social and pop-culture queries on Google and other search engines will eventually take a toll on other informational searches as Ad income slowly moves towards entertainment areas.

As the internet moves towards v2.0 with multimedia and social aspects becoming more prevalent, the average age of user is moving lower as a new generation of internet-savvy children are born. The rumors of a version of the iPad that can be swallowed as a small pill and attach itself to a fetus thus giving internet access to a booming new unborn generation are grossly exagerated!

As the average age of users is reduced the general web search changes. Trending on Yahoo today are subjects like Jessica Biel, Kelly Preston, Ashley Olsen and Brooke Mueller – the most newsworthy event of the day, which is a devastating earthquake in Japan only manages 10^th place on the list – this is an interesting commentary on the users and their interests, and shows that the youth are beginning to control the internet.

Thus, questions that relate to stars such as ‘What is Justin Bieber’s eye color’ or ‘Who is Jessica Biel dating’ are becoming more prevalent and popular.

What are the consequences of the change in popular searches?

Let’s be honest, Google, Yahoo and Bing are not in the search engine business to provide information; their main reason for being in this industry is to gain revenue from Ads – now as the search popularity changes, then the cost of Ads on these sites goes up, and ultimately Google, Yahoo and Bing earn more money. Rather than aiming for true quality information on the web, it’s likely that search engines will be tailored to find the most popular information; thus questions of this nature, although ultimately annoying, will continue to be popular and therefore get great coverage from the search engines!

Does this mean we won’t be able to find real information on the web? I don’t think it will ever come to that, but a lot of sites rely on Google Adsense income for maintenance and if the source of income is reduced because of other more lucrative sources then it’s likely that some of these sites will stop publishing.

Will this have an effect on website owners and writers on the web?

While there are many writers who are posting content on the web simply to help others and to provide decent information, there are millions of writers trying to make a living off the web. There are many content oriented sites (now branded as content farms) that allow amateurs to create content and churn it out on the web. There are some brilliant writers out there, but there are also a lot of duds.

Google have implemented a new algorithm change to sort out this mess, and to allow decent content to rise to the top, but these writers are not stupid and will adapt and change. Not only will they learn how to get around the algorithm, but they will begin to switch to lucrative topics such as ‘questions and answers’ – a lot of the answers to the Justin Bieber questions are simply garbage, so a decent writer who can write several hundred words on the subject, format it nicely, and then do some serious search engine optimization and back-linking could find themselves rising to the top in this very well searched, and ultimately lucrative topic. Ahemmm – now I note here that my intention for this site is not simply to get ranked highly on Google and to get millions of teenage girls looking for Justin Bieber’s phone number on my page, but is more about exploring the subject and what it could do to writer’s earnings on the web. Ultimately a lot of people stand to lose a living if this trend continues untouched.

What can be done to alleviate this problem?

I’m not really sure if there is any way to solve this problem. The search engines are businesses and essentially they are not going to take away a lucrative revenue stream just to ensure integrity and quality information on the web – if the trend is towards pop-culture searches then the major search engines will embrace the change and ensure that they get the largest piece of the pie.

The only thing I can think of that may have a chance of succeeding is for one of the lesser known search engines to focus on eliminating the trash and become more encyclopedic; this certainly would attract an audience and may end up being an lucrative one.

Conclusion

The way we utilize the internet is ever changing, and most of the changes are driven by the younger generations. While the older generations will embrace the changes, sites like Myspace and Facebook succeeded so well because the youth began to use them in millions and us oldies caught on later.

So somehow we have to get the youth of today to realize the importance of information and how the internet uses it – only then can the internet be molded into a powerful tool that will succeed despite the prevalence of pop-culture!