The Perils of My Google Search History

Evil, Writing

A police detective testified Tuesday that a laptop computer taken from the home of a British man accused of killing his wife and 9-month-old daughter was used to search online for “how to kill with a knife” four days before the slayings.

For some time now I’ve been groaning about the movement toward using one’s Google searches as a basis for drawing conclusions about one’s interests, motivations, plans, or problems.

As a writer, I Google all sorts of things that a court might find incriminating. Yes, I Google about various nasty methods in which somebody might die, with a special preference for bombs and poisons, since Clockwork Heart and one of my other works features bomb attacks, and poisons are the fantasy method of surreptitious murder par excellence. Yesterday I Googled pregnancy, menstruation, and abortifacients as background for a chapter in King’s Monster, but that certainly doesn’t mean I’m pregnant or want an abortion. And as an academic, I’ve recently Googled terms like child pornography, virtual child pornography, shota, and pedophilia in order to discuss some of the issues U.S. boys’ love publishers must consider while choosing which titles from Japan they should license. I assure you, I have no interest in molesting children.

Besides, setting aside the question of whether the guy did it, why would anyone need to study up on how to kill with a knife? I mean, how to kill with a knife seems pretty self-evident: Stab. Repeat until victim stops moving.

S0, I had to do it. I opened Google and searched on “how to kill with a knife.” Alas, most of the hits were on the above news story. Several pages deeper I found a link to Hardcore Self Defense in Google Books with the passage, “The intent of this section is not to ‘teach people how to kill with a knife’ (as has been stated above, that is all too easy — even without instruction),” … yeah, that’s what I said. I found a link to a scary foreign YouTube video showing one kid play-killing another with a kitchen knife. Only at hits in the 60s did I start to get someplace, with comments on hog hunting, military knife-fighting, and martial arts. Taking out the quotes in my search helped a little, with slightly more useful hits on methods of murder turning up earlier.

Still, as useful as Google can be, it’s not very efficient. Any properly bloody-minded individual should know that the place to go for all information illegal or shady is Paladin Press. Here we go: Knife Fighting Techniques.

As supervillain Handy shrieked on The Tick, “Read a book!“

drupagliassotti @ June 18, 2008