WebQuest vs. Kleenex

It's amazing to me how much the word WebQuest has entered the lexicon in just 10 years. Google is one gauge of how widely used a word is, so I decided to check out just where it stands compared to other education terms. Here's what I found:

# Pages	Term
1,340,000	lesson plan
664,000	WebQuest
469,000	standardized test
427,000	cooperative learning
402,000	multiple intelligences or multiple intelligence
398,000	problem-based learning
129,000	high-stakes testing
53,300	Bloom's Taxonomy

It would be fallacious, of course, to claim that WebQuests are more than an order of magnitude more famous than Bloom's Taxonomy. Since WebQuests are a web-based format, they're going to be over-represented on web pages compared to paper pages (or in the meat-based minds of educators). Pretty impressive number, though. I decided to see where WebQuests lie within a short list of other items of popular culture and got this:

# Pages	Term
773,000	David Letterman
664,000	WebQuest
476,000	Kleenex
304,000	Clark Kent

Of course, this is small potatoes when you consider that there are close to 44,000,000 pages with the word "iPod" on them, and Britney Spears has over 14 million, but still... not bad for a word I pulled out of the air in 1995.