Last night as I worked on my WIP, I needed to find a designer of women’s tight, sexy dresses.  In my head, I saw the Alaia dress Alicia Silverstone wore in Clueless that she risked a bullet for because she didn’t want to wrinkle it.  But, since I’m finding more and more of my pop culture references need to have the dust blown off, I decided to do an internet search first.  Good thing I did.  As I suspected, Alaia ace bandage dresses are not current on the fashion scene.  These were early to mid-90’s.  Epic fail.  I began searching for other designers, looking at their collections, trying to find a dress that a fashion conscious man would buy for a woman (or vampire in my case) he wanted to make as tempting as possible.  I searched Missoni, Galliano, Betsey Johnson, until I settled on Zac Posen.

That exhaustive search, once concluded, got me thinking about other internet searches I’d conducted over the past few days.  I took a peek at my browser history then filtered on “Bing”, the search engine I use most.  The following are the key words I searched and why:

Zac Posen, Alaia, John Galliano, Betsey Johnson, Missoni–little black dress with va va voom

Alexander Skarsgard–his character Eric Northman on True Blood stated he was a Virgo.  I was curious to see if that’s Alexander’s zodiac sign.  It is.

Fallen Angels, Penemuel, Vassago, Enochian Watchers — for a flash fiction story I wrote and one of the resulting comments.

Terry’s All Gold — a flash fiction story an AW colleague from the UK wrote

Barbara Anderson, Ironside, Perry Mason — a Twitter discussion

Mata Hari, Boer guerrilla tactics — query for All’s Fair in Love and War wording.

Carina Press — the soon-to-be-publisher of an AW buddy of mine whose work I beta read.  I feel like a proud grandma on this one.

Tweet this on WordPress — I wanted that little icon on my blog posts that would allow me or other readers to send links to my post to Twitter.  WordPress obliged by adding this feature the very next day.  The power of psychic suggestion at work obviously.

Survivor Nicaragua birthdays — because I wanted to know the exact birthdays of the contestants.  Sometimes CBS gives this information in the bios and sometimes they don’t.  They didn’t this year.  I still want to know and still haven’t found this data.

Quite the motley list of search terms, eh?  And that’s only since the tenth of August.  I think I’ve got my settings to do an auto-clear once per week so I’ve no record of what I searched prior to that, but I do remember a few:  James Wolk (actor to play Donovan from My Fair Vampire), Deborah Ann Woll (possible Dori actress from My Fair Vampire), Albuquerque nightclubs (My Fair Vampire settings), Christophe Willem (French pop singer), and Secret House (France’s Big Brother).  I do love my internet.

What have you searched for lately and why?