We know what you're searching on the Internet -- and you scare us.

We dug deep and did some research into what people search online.  What did we uncover?  A surprising list of the most popular musicians on the Internet, plus some other very, very disturbing data...

First, the most popular musicians...

You see musicians on the covers of magazines. You see their videos on TV and you hear their songs on the radio. People talk about certain artists all the time while others seems to fly under the radar.

But how popular are these artists, really?

One way of measuring popularity is by keeping track of Internet searches. This is a pretty good barometer of the interest in a certain artist. After all, everyone uses the Internet. Whether you like pop, rock, rap, country, or Swiss yodeling, you're probably keeping tabs on your favorite artists online.

Now sure, this system has its flaws. Bands like Dave Matthews or Pearl Jam might not have the overall numbers, but their fans are mostly die-hards. Many fans don't need to search with Google, because they have an artist's website in their bookmarks. Also, someone like Lindsay Lohan gets thousands of searches, but how many of those are really related to her music and how many are simply looking for her va-jay-jay? It's not a perfect system, but then again, what is?

The following data comes from a company called Wordtracker. The "Wordtracker 1000" represents the 1,000 most popular Internet searches over the past 90 days. They've determined the number of times each word or phrase is searched per day. This data is estimated, but with a sample size of 327 million searches from a wide variety of sites, this is as accurate as you're going to get.

If you've ever wondered how popular your favorite artist is, you'll find this interesting. Or, furthermore, if you've ever wondered how musicians rate against the other popular search topics on the Internet, you'll find this extremely enlightening. I've reviewed this information, and the results are fascinating (and somewhat frightening).

Here we go. And by the way, I hope you're ready. This might get a little long. Plus, you may have suspected this before, but the Internet is a pretty messed up place.


Top 10 Most Popular Musicians

Notice how Brit-Brit and Paris Hilton double the next closest person, Akon. I'm willing to bet this is not entirely based on music. There is a certain theme to the Internet that is far more prevalent than all others (more on this in a little bit). But this really lets you see the popularity of artists like Akon, Lil Wayne and My Chemical Romance. I mean, none of them even have vaginas, and yet, there they are, hanging with the likes of Jessica Simpson and Beyonce.

The next five most popular searches are no surprise: Chris Brown, American Idol, Lindsay Lohan, 50 Cent and Justin Timberlake.

But the 16th most popular artist on the web surprised me a lot: Three Days Grace. I knew they were popular, but I never thought they were this popular. They're ranked ahead of Christina Aguilera, Ludacris, J. Lo, Hilary Duff, Panic! At The Disco and Nickelback. Pretty impressive.

Other Surprises

Weird Al (#23 for musicians, #203 overall) - I guess this makes sense. After all, he did write a song called "All About The Pentiums."

Linkin Park (#26, #218 overall) / Pretty Ricky (#27, #219 overall) - What? Linkin Park, one of the most successful rock band of the 2000s, is one spot above Pretty Ricky? Am I missing something here? Did Pretty Ricky write a song called "Girl, We Gonna Stay Up All Night And Search Yahoo?" Or are Linkin Park fans not able to use computers cause they all hurt their arms playing cock-rock air guitar?

Hinder (#31, #238 overall) - They're bringing the rock and roll back to the Net, motherfuckers!!! Also, the phrase "lips of an angel" was the Internet's 317th most popular search, although that could have nothing to do with Hinder.

System of a Down (#36, #270 overall) - Despite breaking up months ago, System remains very highly ranked. Apparently B.Y.O.B. stands for "bring your own browser."

Carrie Underwood (#41, #296 overall) - The top-searched country artist on the Internet, and there are 40 higher-ranked musicians and 295 higher-ranked searches. Once they get wireless hook-ups on tractors, her numbers are expected to rise dramatically.

HelloGoodbye (#47, #349 overall) - That sound you hear is my respect for society slowing drifting away.

Rammstein (#78, #656 overall) - And you thought Germans were only looking up crazy sheister porn.

Michael Jackson (#84, #679 overall) - Don't worry, Chris Hansen of "Dateline" is already on top of it.

Atreyu (#92, #750 overall) - Surrounded by bigger names like AC/DC, Queen, Tool and Ashanti. Only two spots behind Madonna.

Blue October (#96, #797 overall) / Daughtry (#97, #816 overall) - Daughtry's album has been in the top ten for months, while Blue October's album makes a flimsy coaster at best. Yet, look who's ahead.

The Killers (#106, #902 overall) / U2 (#107, #904 overall) / The Beatles (#108, #914 overall) / Good Charlotte (#110, #935 overall) / Ashlee Simpson (#114, #954 overall) - All of these artists get around 15,000 searches a day. The Beatles beat out Ashlee Simpson by about 300 searches. Good work, Earth.


Artists That Didn't Make The Wordtracker Top 1000

Three 6 Mafia, Jay-Z, Paula Abdul, Rage Against The Machine, Mandy Moore, Guns N' Roses, Oasis, Coldplay, Paula Deanda, Audioslave, Katharine McPhee, Bloc Party, Pearl Jam, Dave Matthews Band, Chris Cornell, The Strokes, Tom Morello, Powderfinger, Tapes n Tapes, Robert Randolph and the Family Band


Tom Morello, despite going through an Audioslave break-up, a Rage reunion, and a legendary South by Southwest performance in the past 90 days, managed 261 searches per day. Meanwhile, "baby names" is searched over 40,000 times a day. That means 40,000 people a day turn to the Internet to name their child, but only 261 people a day care about one of our generation's most identifiable guitarists. In a couple years, when every kid is named "Firewall" or "Beastiality Pics," maybe people will reconsider what they're doing.

Robert Randolph & The Family Band average 65 searches a day. Better start playing their song on every NBC show instead of just 75% of them. Tapes n Tapes managed a surprisingly poor showing as well, getting about 91 searches a day. Looks like Clell Tickle needs to bust a few more heads.

Oasis gets about 10,000 searches a day, but considering their success you'd expect more. I'm sure Noel or Liam called the Google guys "a bunch of wankers" at some point and there's a ban against them.

Rage Against The Machine recently reunited after being broken up for ten years. Still, they manage an mediocre 11,000 searches a day. That doesn't seem to reflect their popularity. But it's actually a good thing, cause higher popularity would mean that Zack de la Rocha might actually have to work.

Paula Abdul is unranked with about 12,000 daily searches, despite being on the most popular show on TV. We tried to ask her why this is, but she was high on painkillers and couldn't speak.


So there are the musicians. Where do they rank against other searches on the Internet? Well, this might be tough to believe, but people on the Internet seem to like pornography. In fact, after scanning the complete Wordtracker 1000, it appears that around 250 of the searches are sex-related. That's roughly 1 in every 4. Damn perverts.

Here are some of the other top searches on the Internet. Be warned, this isn't pretty.


Top Five Overall Searches

1) Porn
2) Pussy
3) MySpace
4) Sex
5) Google

Let that set in. The porn doesn't surprise me, though the fact that "porn," "pussy" and "sex" combine for over 650,000 daily searches is a little disturbing. But what about those other two? MySpace? The URL for MySpace is - get this - MySpace.com. You're telling me 211,520 people a day can't remember that and need to search for it? Seriously? And what about Google? Google is the Internet's top search engine, and it still gets 191,198 searches a day. Think about that. That means there are thousands of people a day searching for "Google"... ON GOOGLE!!! And it doesn't stop there. "Ebay" is the 7th most popular search on the Internet. Ebay's website is ebay.com. The #10 search is Yahoo. Yahoo's website? Yahoo.com. Also a search engine. It goes on and on like this, but my favorite was "search engines," which was the 94th most popular search with 39,224 queries a day. 39,224 people a day are going on a search engine to search for a search engine. How stupid can you possibly be?

Of course, sex completely dominates the top 1,000 searches. And it's heterosexuals doing this searching, too. The highest gay search was "gay sex" at #124. So much for the stereotype that gay people are the deviant orientation. As I mentioned before, probably a quarter of the top 100 are sexual words/phrases, most of which I wouldn't dare repeat here.

Let's take a look at the searches that stand out, and then we'll wrap this up...


Odd Combinations

#14 - Free porn

#15 - Game cheats for ps2

The numbers for these two are strikingly similar. Probably the same people.

#104 - Home Depot

#105 - F**king

There's definitely a wood-related joke here.

#137 - Masturbation
#138 - Obituaries
These don't seem to go together too well.

#216 - Shemale
#217 - Cats
It's always nice to have a companion.


#295 - Lolitas
#296 - Carrie Underwood
Coincidence?


#425 - 2Pac
#426 - Gospel music lyrics
What, "Hit ‘Em Up" doesn't take care of both?


#544 - Jennifer Aniston sedu hairstyle
#545 - Martin Luther King
Well, Jennifer does have fabulous hair, but Dr. King inspired what was probably the greatest civil rights movement in history. He should probably be ahead.


#836 - Hooters
#837 - Pregnant
These things go together like peanut butter and gasoline.


#913 - Herpes
#914 - The Beatles
Oh, COME ON!!! Herpes had a couple good albums, but we're talking about the Beatles here!!!


#942 - Catholic Churches
#943 - The Holocaust
Moving along...


#983 - MySpace backgrounds
#998 - College
Nice to see that teenage girls have their priorities straight.


Other Noteworthy Searches

#31 - Anna Nicole Smith
#47 - Antonella Barba
See, even the flash-in-the-pan stories don't get the daily hits of a Paris or Britney. At least we're rewarding people for long-term craziness. It's about building a solid body of work, people.


#51 - test
People search for "test." Thanks for testing out the system, everyone, but I think Google's tech guys have it covered.


#102 - Jessica Alba
Alba gets 36,555 searches a day. Of course, 36,500 of those are from me. Don't judge me.


#214 - Rape
#300 - Child Porn
#341 - Horse Sex
#372 - Dog Sex
#658 - Incest stories
#679 - Michael Jackson
Frightening.


#236 - Brittany Spears
Britney is so popular, this particular misspelling of her name is the 236th most popular search. It gets 20,468 searches a day.


#237 - Raven Riley
Lusted after by 20,455 perverts a day. That's so Raven.


#240 - "How to save a life"
It's sad, but I guarantee this is in reference to The Fray. No one cares about saving lives.


#274 - Dragons
???


#277 - Movies
In a normal world, this would be top ten.


#391 - "I wanna love you"
You should probably start by getting off the computer.


#397 - Pete Wentz
[No comment]


#542 - Nirvana
#543 - Bleach
Fitting.


#560 - iTunes
#719 - Sexy back
[No comment, again]


#886 - Kendra Wilkinson
People are so sex-crazed on the Internet, they're apparently making up names that sound like they could possibly be hot chicks. Who the hell is Kendra Wilkinson? Is that a real person? I think she was in my 11th grade history class.


#919 - Abraham Lincoln
Honest Abe was ranked just below "skinny dipping" and "my friend's hot mom." Nice. You think he's up in Heaven, looking down at us and yelling, "oh... yeah... good work everyone... all I did was win the Civil War and create the Emancipation Proclamation... but yeah, just rank me 20 spots behind ‘toys r us'... thanks, jackasses!!!"?


#976 - Crack
I need some crack... where's my laptop?


Conclusion

Well, that was exhausting, but I think we learned some important lessons:

-While being a trendy topic of discussion does help, long-term success is more important than creating a brief stir. Sorry, Antonella Barba.

-People love vaginas.

-Young people utilize the Internet much more than older generations. I think we knew this already.

-Crack is available online.

-Country fans generally avoid the Internet, which probably makes them the smartest music fans.

-It's probably best if your favorite artist isn't among the top Internet searches.

-The Internet is a sick, sick place that should be avoided at all costs.

I'm glad we did that research. I'm gonna go throw up now. Excuse me.

[Here's the full list of the 100 Most Popular Musicians on the Internet.]