By now you’ve probably seen Elena’s Inbox, the nifty standalone site that the Sunlight Foundation created to give people an easy way to browse the Clinton-era emails of Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan. (The Clinton Presidential Library released them last week.)
Since visitors can peruse the epistles by searching for specific terms, we wondered: Which terms, exactly, are people most curious about? The Sunlight Foundation very kindly provided us with the list below.
“Fuck” unsurprisingly makes the cut, though we don’t know if searchers were thinking of it in terms of “the beast with two backs” or simply as an explicative. “Monica” and “Lewinsky” also predictably make an appearance, at numbers 18 and 19 respectively.
But the most searched-for item? The top five items (marked with asterisks (*)) are actually included in the site’s list of “sample searches” (see image, below), so we’re disregarding those. That makes “gay” the top unsolicited search, presumably from folks concerned that Kagan is a lesbian and hoping the emails will contain a smoking gun in the form of some unguarded scribbling like, perhaps, “…and of course habeus corpus applies in this case, because I’m gay dammit!”
Top 20 terms searched for
1. making the President look like a liar*
2. unbelievable*
3. brady checks*
4. pervasively sectarian*
5. firestorm*
6. gay
7. abortion
8. red sage* (The name of a popular DC restaurant)
9. fuck
10. clinton
11. dinner
12. lunch
13. sex
14. gun
15. guns
16. leak
17. shit
18. monica
19. lewinsky
20. harvard
* Items included in site’s list of “sample searches” and so do not qualify as “unsolicited”

