Ryan McFarland

For me it began while watching one of the Alias seasons on DVD. Cena and I noticed that in nearly every episode one of the characters said the word “insane” and i blogged about how Alias is Insane at the time. Ever since then we have been sensitive to the mention of the word. You wouldn’t believe how frequent the word comes up. It’s just insane.

Check out, for instance the insane submissions to Digg over the last seven days that include the word insane in the title alone. Interestingly, a search for crazy on Digg found about twice as many instances in the title of submissions.

But YouTube is completely insane - right now there are over 21,000 videos in the results for a search for the word. To be fair, the word “crazy” ends up with over 23,000 results. But consider that there are some big hits with music videos like Gnarles Barkley’s Crazy (over 1,400), Aerosmith’s Crazy (over 400), Beyonce’s Crazy in Love (over 1,500), Buckcherry’s Crazy Bitch (a few hundred), Simple Plan’s Crazy (around 1,800), and of course there are well over 4000 instances of Crazy Frog variations. That gives us less than 14,000 videos with “crazy” in the title. A similar study of the results for insane left me with Cypress Hill’s Insane in the Brain (over 500), Infected Mushroom’s Becoming Insane (around 50), and just over 1,100 videos by Insane Clown Posse. Apparently the music industry is not enamored with the word “insane”. How can a word like “crazy” have fewer instances than it’s stronger synonym? I wondered if the whole internet was crazy or insane.

A search on Google for crazy yields 276 million pages and “craziness” shows 3 million with 1.1 million pages with both words. Google found only 42 million pages that were insane and another 21 million with “insanity” with 1.3 million pages having both words.

What about movies? How many movies have insane or crazy in their title. Thanks to IMDB there are 436 crazy films and only 16 insane movies. That seemed sort of low. Searching for “insanity” turned up another 24.

• Using Google’s ratio the internet is 81% crazy and 18% insane.
• Digg submissions are 66% crazy and 33% insane.
• YouTube (minus the videos listed) is 68% insane and 31% crazy.
• The music industry (using above songs) is 89% crazy and 11% insane.
• The movie industry is 91% crazy and 8% insane.

Conclusions
Using Google as a baseline we can see that YouTube clearly has users that prefer videos of people behaving insanely over crazily. Digg submissions are more true to reality with the ratio coming much closer to the gospel that is Google. The music and film industries are not firmly planted in reality. They gloss over life and paint things as only crazy when sometimes they truly are insane. If it were not for Cypress Hill and Insane Clown Posse we would all be crazy.