If you haven’t heard of Katrina Darrell yet, she’s probably incredibly disappointed, and so are her, ahem, handlers. After all, her name is currently at the top of Google Hot Trends’ top search gainer list. She’s also known as “bikini girl,” in case you didn’t catch her name for all the, well, distraction. 
It’s not like she didn’t try—really, really hard—to get everybody’s attention. In addition to her nearly nude audition and obvious willingness to advance her career via, um, lip service to Ryan Seacrest, Darrell seems to have been prepared for the surge of online interest created by her national TV debut.
In fact, she seems pretty well optimized for searching. You could credit Google for its speed and effectiveness, but generally spikes in name searches related to TV events are limited to Google News results.
But searching for her brings back a website, katrinadarrell.org, with photos and clips from the show, and she ranks pretty high for the term “bikini girl,” too, a fairly generic and (one imagines) historically sought-after phrase.
At the top of the results is a YouTube video posted in November called “LovinLife With Katrina Darrell,” a two-and-a-half minute commercial for a multimedia marketing company featuring the modeling of last night’s American Idol tryout, embedding disabled by request. Not exactly an amateur move there.
The company’s website didn’t miss posting a section on their website labeled “Katrina Darrell – Bikini Girl,” ready to soak up all that guaranteed post-Idol debut traffic magic.
Her name also pops up among the cast of the 1999 Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen movie, Passport to Paris.
For some reason, I’m starting to think this was all some kind of publicity stunt. After Antonella Barba, who’d have thought it would have worked a second time?
