Over the last few months, Comscore has reported declining paid search clicks on Google.com. Hand-wringing pundits have therefore wrung their hands mightily, pointing to this as a sign that the End Is Upon Us.
We found out that the clicks weren’t actually gone. They were just lost for a bit.

Portent Interactive has conducted exhaustive research and discovered that Google’s Adwords click traffic has actually increased month over month for the last six months. The entire kerfuffle is due to a phenomenon known to anyone who does laundry and wonders where those odd socks end up.

After speaking with an unidentified Google search engineer, we confirmed that Google has also been searching for these lost clicks. After installing the new Google SockSearch on 2,000,000 dryers nationwide, the missing clicks have been found. As have 400,000,000 odd socks.

Google confirms that SockSearch is focused purely on aggregate sock data and collects no information about underwear or color/white separation habits.

I just searched tomorrow’s stock results, and Google’s stock is going up tomorrow due in part to the good news about their click volumes, but also because of the estimated street value of 400 million socks.