Web Comic "xkcd" Leads Readers to the Phrase "I Should Have Kissed Her"

Webcomic xkcd (which is an acronym for nothing in particular), authored by Randall Monroe, has dominated Internet searches with its most recent installment called "Regrets."

The comic "Regrets" features an illustrated graph detailing side-by-side Google results for the phrases "I shouldn't have kissed her [or him]" and "I should have kissed her [or him]." The results reveal that the latter phrase yields a greater amount of Google searches, perhaps from individuals around the world who feel regret for their missed moment of initiative.

The comic actually features not one but two punch lines; when a cursor hovers over the image, a message appears, reading, "And nothing for 'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'"

Coincidentally enough (I think not!), searches have spiked not for the phrase "Epic Movie" but instead "'I'm glad I saw Epic Movie.'"

Critics and casual moviegoers have slammed Epic Movie, a spoof film on a multitude of action-adventure epic flicks.

But why are people really searching for "I should have kissed her"? Is it only to see whether or not there are 10,230 search results, as the webcomic claims?

Probably.

As of August 4, there are actually only about 7,620 results related to the query phrase "I should have kissed her" when quotation marks are used, according to Google search results. When searching for "I should have kissed her" without quotation marks, results will include any Web site or page that contains the words "I," "should," "have," "kissed" and "her." The outcome? Millions of Web sites.

Luckily enough, even without quotation marks, the phrase "I should have kissed her" will lead Googlers to the online forums for the webcomic - the Web site is result number two of the search.

Over at the forums, user Grego commented, "So very humorous considering it's just truth. Plus it's funny (and scary) that "I should have kissed her" is the number one search in the U.S. at the moment."

Scary because the Google query "I should have kissed her" reveals how large xkcd's readership is. Because the webcomic centers around computer science and even mathematics (xkcd calls itself "a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math and language"), readers can easily "participate" with the comic, depending on an installment's central message and punch line.

For example, in comic 240 called "Dream Girl" of xkcd (published in March 2007), Munroe posted the coordinates 42.39561, -71.13051. With GPS devices, fans from all over the world met Munroe at the noted location - Reverend Thomas J. Williams Park in North Cambridge - on September 23, 2007 at 2:38 p.m.

The comic "Dream Girl" was about a dream a boy had of a girl he met "in a dying world." In the dream, the girl said a sequence of numbers to the boy before he awoke. Those numbers were the coordinates Munroe selected, which were illustrated next to a date and time.

The ending message of the comic's installment was "Wanting something doesn't make it real." But Munroe said at the meeting with the hundreds of fans, "Maybe wanting does make it real. Clearly, the comic needs to be corrected."

And "corrected" it was - fans wrote new ending messages in the final panel, including phrases such as "First post?!," "xkcd is made of people" and "I came all the way from NYC to have my dream come true."

xkcd can indeed move people, if not to travel to mysterious locations, then to search for phrases like "I should have kissed her" in Google.

Munroe graduated from Christopher Newport University in 2006 with a degree in physics and was a contractor for NASA.

Sources:

http://thephoenix.com//Boston/News/48208-wisdom-of-crowds/
http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&p=798760
www.xkcd.com