Ooh La La!

Media stories in July 2007, on this website and in the national and regional press, reported that Google Trends, which purports to show what percentage of a town's inhabitants are searching for what subject, ranked Thames Ditton fourth on the search term 'porn.'

Technobabble laid bare

We also found that Thames Ditton ranked amazingly high (for a village with no server banks on the Internet backbone) on other search terms. We expressed considerable scepticism at the time. Technically, Google cannot refine an area down to a small village such as Thames Ditton unless searchers themselves tell Google where they are searching from. Each computer online is allotted a unique Internet Protocol address which for most individuals will be temporary and traceable only to the location of the server used by your internet service provider. Only your internet service provider knows at any one moment which user is assigned that address - not Google. For example, the computer on which this is being written has, for the moment, an IP address assigned by our service provider BT Internet. Searching for the whereabouts of that IP address currently shows it to be located on a server in Dundee, not Thames Ditton! If you want to see what information your browser sends, check here, or look up your IP address in 'IP Information' here.

Curious, that.

Furthermore, you can restrict the results from Google Trends to a specific country. We noted that while Thames Ditton ranked fourth worldwide among searchers for 'porn' it ranked nowhere when results where restricted to the UK! Furthermore, a search (on Google ...) to see whether there was some other population centre in the world called 'Thames Ditton' that might account for this anomaly failed to reveal any.

The shady side of Thames Ditton? Steep decline in porn searches after Google exposure...

At the time, your webmaster emailed Google to say that Google Trends seemed to be less than rigorous, at best; and downright misleading at worst. Google did not reply. But, still on the scent, when we lately checked Google Trends on 16 September it was to discover that Thames Ditton now ranks nowhere on the search term 'porn' either worldwide or in the UK. Curious, that. Of course, it might be that Google has tweaked that particular result.... or perhaps the scandalous media coverage has made residents cover their tracks better?! The top area worldwide for searches on 'porn' is now Birmingham. However Birmingham ranks only tenth when results are restricted to UK. Hopelessly unscientific.

Today, searching on the word 'innocent,' Thames Ditton ranks 5 in the UK. How things have changed! Other anomalies remain. Searching for 'parking,' Thames Ditton ranks first in the world, which will immediately find resonance with High Street residents. But within the UK, we are only no.2, behind St Albans. So it is with 'drains,' where we are world number 1 - which will surpise nobody; but only second in UK. 'Floods' give similar results. Only on 'wellington boots,' possibly a subject dear to the Village in the light of drains and floods, do we find that Thames Ditton is both world and UK no.1. Meanwhile on searching for 'rubbish' TD residents are an energetic second worldwide, and 7th in the UK on 'tripe.' Make of that what you will.

The naked truth

Meanwhile in the interests of rigour we have also researched the possibility that there might have been some substance behind the TD-porn connections. Local readers with a more retentive memory have informed us, with varying degrees of reliability, that in the early 1900s the riverside was lined with the weekend retreats of actors, showgirls and Those Sorts Of People, and villagers believed there were all kinds of goings-on in that community. The amusing social question: "Are you married, or do you live in Thames Ditton?" was adapted from "Are you married, or do you live in Kenya?" and later became "Are you married, or do you live on The Island?"

We have also picked up plausible but unconfirmed reports that in bygone days an upstairs room in a public House in Weston Green was a venue for, well, sexual easement; while blue-ish movies were shown, and possibly made, in an upstairs room at another in Thames Ditton. In the 1970s a house in Angel Road was reportedly a venue for swingers parties. More recently, there are reports of a local photographer, again upstairs, including some provocative shots among their oeuvre. We are constantly amazed by Thames Ditton's pre-eminent achievements in so many fields. But prima facie such activities seem unlikely to promote these villages to top world billing over, say, London, Bangkok or Los Angeles.