Well, this is convenient. Google published its 2011 Zeitgeist list of the fastest-growing search terms of the year. The No. 2 term on the list, right behind No. 1 “Rebecca Black,” is its own product, “Google+”. Since nobody ever heard of Google+ until this year, and it received loads of news coverage as Google’s strongest attempt yet to take on Facebook, searches for the term rose more than 10,000 percent.
Remember, Google’s Zeitgeist is a curated list based on the fastest-growing search terms of the past year, not the ones with the most absolute volume. This focus produces a more interesting list of trending topics for the year. Overall, the list this year is Apple-heavy with “iPhone 5″ (No. 6), “Steve Jobs” (No. 9), and “iPad2″ (No. 10) all showing up. The Japanese word for Fukushima, “東京 電力” (No. 8), also made it, as did “Battlefield 3″ (No. 3) and “Casey Anthony” (No. 4). → Read More
From the folks that brought you Google Wave Cinema, comes Google Zeitgeist 2010: The Video. As a poignant reminder that the year is almost over, the video highlights the searches that changed our lives or at least the topics of our dinner conversations, from the Gulf Oil Spill to the Thai political crisis to Bed Intruder, this was 2010. With a Vuvuzela thrown in for good measure. → Read More
Microsoft already featured the top search terms entered in its Bing search engine this year, leading us to conclude that “Michael Jackson Beats Out Twitter”. On Bing, that is.
But we could have picked nearly the same headline for Google’s just-published Zeitgeist 2009, only it would read “Michael Jackson Beats Out Twitter, Facebook And Windows 7″.
Google once again examined the billions of queries that people around the world typed into its search box, weeded out the spam and NSFW stuff and came up with this list. → Read More
Whenever you want to take a reading of the current zeitgeist, popular search terms can tell you a lot about what’s on people’s minds. Right now, for instance, the hottest search terms on Google Trends include “lakewood police shooting,” “tiger woods mistress,” “surviving Christmas,” and “cyber monday 2009 deals.” If you look at Trending Topics on Twitter, however, you’ll see “Soul Train Awards.” I suspect only the first one might make it as a trending search term.
The overlap between trending search terms and Tweets is remarkably low (even if Twitter itself is a popular search term). A couple weeks ago I was moderating a realtime search panel when Vik Singh (the engineer behind Yahoo Boss, soon to be an EIR at Sutter Hill Ventures) declared that only 2 percent of all Tweets match trending search terms. → Read More
Google released its 2008 Zeitgeist list of the most popular search terms for the year. Unlike Yahoo’s 2008 list of top search terms, Google looks at the fastest-rising searches of the year. That makes for a slightly more interesting list. (Yahoo’s list was basically a repeat of its 2007 list). Below are the two lists, and you can compare to Google’s list for 2007, which was dominated by technology searches (“iphone,” “facebook,” “youtube”).
The top-level Zeitgeist lists are not too surprising (they never are). The most interesting trends reveal themselves only when you dive deeper. For instance, in terms of search popularity, we find that “facebook” beat out “myspace,” the “martini” beat out the “mojito,” and “ice cream” beat out “chili.” → Read More
