In this article, we explore the structure of the web as an indicator of popular culture and its use in Multimedia Exhibits. In a series of art and tech\-no\-logy installations, the software agency needs to keep `grounded' to what people can readily understand. We administered a survey to understand how people perceived word and phrase obscurity related with frequency information gathered from a popular Web search engine. We found the frequency data gathered from the engine closely matched judgments gathered from people. The results of this study point to the new applications of the WWW in art and multimedia exhibits as an indicator of popular culture.