It's a very obvious search question for people who want to read up on him, to expand their knowledge which unless you're a newsjunkie or were actually an adult when 9/11 happened is mostly going to be "Asshole, 9/11 mastermind, has beard, hates US, apparently dead" its not going to include his family, connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, or his original rise to prominence during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, because mos tpeople catch maybe 5 minutes of news a day, and a lot catch way less, and nobody sits around reading the headlines off and pausing to give a detailed summary of prominent figures lives, they just toss off the short phrase everyone knows best to provide context because a name isn't always enough to automatically summon who it is to mind for the five seconds they'll be talking about them, "Robert Smith, from the Cure, was ------ today, and Actor BlahBlah, in other news, Pop Sensation -------blah was arraigned for ------, Osama bin Laden, leader of Al Qaeda and Mastermind of the 9/11 bombings blah-blah, now sports." and they usually drop the little context blurb as reminder if someone's been in the news a lot recently. So someone who was in elementary or pre-school for 9/11 has probably, even if they were watching headlines everyday (pretty unlikely) never heard more than the same one sentence blurb on bin Laden. Let's add school, but we don't know how many people actually did that search, it never said that I saw, even if it were millions, kids miss class from being sick etc pretty regularly, it would be less than abnormal for one kid in class of 25 to be out sick the day WTC and 9/11 got covered in that class. You could easily have a million kids who missed that day, and just know of bin Laden from random comments from adults, which are probably not very informative. Hell that's such an obvious search phrase you'd expect to see 1000s of hits for it just from people who were assigned reports 'write about one major figure in current events' and picked him to write about, maybe didn't want to pull wiki up because its bland. and "Who is ?" is hardly bad somehow because "? wiki" pullls it up with a few keystrokes less, "I want to know more about X" is long and will get you the same results, you might avoid saying that to people lest they think you dumb but most people don't worry about search engine's opinions of them.

I don't see how you can ascribe epidemic ignorance on these grounds.