Who is Gambar Pemerkosaan?...

As you may already know if you found this lens by doing a Web Search, Gambar Pemerkosaan is a very popular search engine keyword, with more than 2,000 searches every day (during its "peak" days). Based on Wordtracker search tool, Gambar Pemerkosaan was ranked in the top 20 most popular keywords on Googlefor a long time during 2008. And it still pretty solid, as you can see in the Wordtracker list at right. Last time I checked it was getting 188 daily searches on Google (that's more than 5,600 google searches every month).

As you can see, Gambar Pemerkosaan is a very popular term on the World Wide Web. This probably makes you think that whatever or whoever Gambar Pemerkosaan is, it should be famous, interesting or at least extremely funny... and it should make you wonder why you never heard about Gambar Pemerkosaan before... Am I right?...

I also checked the Google Images Search, I got some pictures of beautiful women that based on their source website are supposed to be Gambar Pemerkosaan, a famous asian actress/singer. But after a deeper investigation, I found out that these pictures are indeed from a famous Malaysian singer, but her name is not Gambar Pemerkosaan (her real name is Siti Nurhaliza). I placed a sample picture at the right, and another one at the beginning of this page (from an Indonesian actress/model, whose real name is unknown) .

There were many other pictures found on my search, but incredibly enough most of them are sexually-explicit pictures (involving raping). Some others are from a porn star, but after looking for more information seems to be a false premise as well.

OK, here we go... and for real this time. After looking for information in many places (websites shown above, and some others) this is what I think is the answer to the question. There is no human being named Gambar Pemerkosaan, or at least it is not a famous person nor the reason why this keyword has so many google searches. This is what I think is what happened:

The phrase "Gambar Pemerkosaan" comes from the Indonesian language, and it means "rape pictures" (that is the reason why so many Google images involved rape). About a decade ago there was a big massacre in Indonesia (allegedly lead by the government) against the Timorese people. More than 1,500 people were tortured, raped, and murdered during this incident. These events were documented (including writings, pictures and even videos of these murders) but kept as classified information for many years. In july 2008 these records were freely published, and some of that information was available over the Internet. That information included rape pictures, and this was the reason why this phrase was so popular in search engines (people looking for these pictures).

So what happened next?... Other people looking for the most popular search engine keywords (mostly online marketers and website owners, ignoring that Indonesian incident) notice that there is "this weird keyword" placed as one of the most popular searches, and they got curious about why this keyword is so popular. So they started looking for "Gambar Pemerkosaan" information, doing even more Google searches, and some even started using (and abusing) this keyword for their own benefit (adding it to their websites and even creating websites based on this keyword).

Eventually, maybe the people looking for rape pictures decreased, but now you have online marketers (and other curious people) searching for the keyword, online opportunists making ad websites and youtube videos based on the keyword (looking for a quick profit), people adding these words to their websites just to attract random visitors, and it goes on and on... At the end, this Gambar Pemerkosaan thing became a world class event, with thousands of people doing online searches about it every day (without even know what it is).

Maybe this is not the best example and it was not necessarily created on purpose, but this phenomenon is what Internet Marketers call "Viral Marketing". When something in the Internet "becames viral", it means that many people have found it and talked about it, making even more people start looking for it. All this "hype" creates a chain reaction that at the end could attract a huge amount of Internet visitors.