The Irish are lonely, S'poreans search for happiness

Ireland may be enjoying stellar economic growth and seen as one of the best places in the world to live, but its inhabitants are apparently also the globe’s loneliest, Reuters reported.

Google Trends, which works out how many searches have been done via the Internet search engine on particular terms, showed the word “lonely” was entered most frequently by Internet users in Ireland.

The Irish, enjoying new-found wealth and a flood of immigration following more than a century of economic decline, are followed in the misery stakes by residents of Singapore and New Zealand - although Singaporeans are the most frequent searchers of “happiness”.

Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for a given term coming from each city, region or language divided by total Google searches coming from the same area. Ireland’s capital, Dublin, topped the city list for “lonely" searches, followed by Melbourne, Australia and Auckland, New Zealand.

In 2004, the Economist magazine named Ireland the best place to live in the world in a “quality of life” assessment.

As someone who knows a few Singaporeans, I'm not at all surprised that they are miserable. They are a emotionally-repressed bunch. Add to that the kiasu and kiasi (scared to lose, scared to die) mentality. Voila! the recipe for misery.

I wonder what the search results are for Malaysia. No doubt sex-related words will be high on the list. Do you know that Malaysians are among the most active participants of sex forums in the world?