Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” is close enough to Hippocrates’ “First, do no harm.” But trust national health policy to a search engine?

As of this morning, Google Trends, the search-term tracking tool on which this medical breakthrough is based, also reports that the name of ancient comedian “Don Rickles” is the third-most frequently searched phrase in the United States, while “Lucy Pinder,” a British model popular for posing nude, ranks sixth. Drilling down, you discover that the wrinkled Rickles and the Photoshop-smoothed Pinder share the same “Hotness” rating: Mild. And below that, Google Trends says Don Rickles’ peak was seven hours ago. (OK, he was on Jay Leno last night but still, we’re talking decades, not hours.)

If we can’t trust Google Trends on celebs, do we really want to give them the keys to the Centers for Disease Control?

Google users whose searches lead them to the Minnesota Independent don’t tend to cluster around trendy topics like Don Rickles, Lucy Pinder or the flu. For example, at one point this morning, the second-most commonly searched string that brought readers the MnIndy (after “Minnesota Independent”) was “smiley-face killer,” a story that peaked six months ago, but apparently still piques interest among the erudite.

What I’d like Google to explain is why someone in Moscow visited MnIndy this morning after a search for “steller franken.” I’m more worried about that than the flu.