Americans are most likely to search for sex online during the early summer and the winter, according to research just published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
The authors looked at the Google Trends for a selection of naughty words and phrases, and this revealed a pretty marked 6 month cycle for searches originating from the USA, with two yearly peaks in the search volumes. There was no such pattern for some non-sexual control words.
Here's the graph for pornography searches, with an idealized 6 month cycle also shown for comparison. The data were similar for two other categories of sexual words: prostitution and dating websites. Overall the results seem solid, although in studies like this, I always worry a bit about how the included search terms were chosen; there is a potential for cherry picking (no pun intended).
Those words in full:
The pornography keyword set included 10 keywords ...
