Surfing for the perfect smooch

HOW to snog is apparently what most people really want to know when they are “googling” these days, recent research shows.

Typing in “how to kiss” on the Google Ireland page yesterday produced 10 results from 5.7 million hits.

And the first two results were websites that had video footage on how to kiss someone passionately.

The third result was how to French kiss, described by the website as “a timeless and passionate gesture of romantic affection”.

Another site came with a warning that kissing can be a hard thing to do until you get “comfortable” doing it.

But the second top search on Google’s Zeitgeist for Ireland in the “how to” category is how to draw, followed by how to drive.

This year’s hottest searches, released yesterday by Google Ireland, found the Oxegen Festival topped the ticket searches; the Atkins diet was the most searched-for diet, while Australia was the place most people wanted to fly to.

And the top county searches revealed property was most on people’s minds in Louth while people in Kildare were more interested in shopping than anything else.

In Cork, the most searched-for information was on this year’s general election while “politicians” was the word most keyed-in by people in Galway.

Information on the Gaelic Athletic Association topped the search list in Kerry; it was rugby in Limerick and movies in Dublin.

After Oxegen the hottest tickets were for the Electric Tickets. But the third-most-popular search in this category was GAA tickets, followed by tickets for Liverpool football games.

While some of the searches are fairly common, Google points out up to one in four queries on any given day are new, that is, they have not seen them before.

The fastest-rising overall searches were YouTube and Bebo.

When it comes to bargain hunting, however, the most searches are for cheap flights, cheap holidays and cheap hotels — in that order.

The Google Zeitgeist is calculated from the aggregation of the most popular and fast-rising search queries being typed into the www.google.ie search box.