Zeitgeist 2011: How the World Searched | Hacker News Reader

Zeitgeist 2011: How the World Searched

googlezeitgeist.com

30 pointskrelian20 comments

I enjoy looking at these trends every year, but what a painfully designed website. Does this really need to be an overkill javascript "Web application" for what can easily be rendered as a few static pages of lists and facts?

And sheesh, look at that huge amount of space wasted by those persistent top and bottom grey and blue bars. My 1280x800 laptop screen is already constrained enough on the Y axis as it is. The site sure does look modern though. </old man web3.0 rant>

yea i hate this, despite it looking pretty- where is 11-20? cant I see some data without having to click on each of the top 10?

Funny how not in touch I am with the mainstream. The only thing I would consider searching for is Fukushima. I have never heard about either of the 3 women.

"I have never heard about either of the 3 women."

Me too, I had to google them to learn who they were ;)

I'm not even sure how a person keeps up with the mainstream. I've found a few entertainment magazines, but very few of the stories on the websites are interesting enough for me to grab the RSS feed or newsletter.

But would you search for it in Japanese? The fact that is shows up like this is quite interesting in itself.

東京電力 is apparently TEPKO (The Tokyo Electric Power Company), rather than Fukushima. As their site says, it's pretty incredible that search volumes for this rose so quickly that 東京電力 is in the global Top 10, despite searches being almost entirely from only Japan.

wouldn't say out of touch, just get to your information other ways. More adept users aren't searching they're heading to news sources via links, social networks, etc etc.

Whats more interesting is that there are a bunch of social networks that are on the Fastest Falling search terms: http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en/top-lists/global/fastest-f...

6 out of the 10 are social networks.

Has Facebooks total dominance of the space finally taken hold?

Has Facebooks total dominance of the space finally taken hold?

That happened back in 2008. It just takes a while for the remaining zero growth social networks to stop fooling their boards and die out. After a few years of zero growth, the boards stop believing "next year will be the best year ever" or "we are more aligned with success than ever before" from delusional CEOs.

Celebrities, and Consumerism are 90% of the most searched items all year? It's kind of sad really.

Note that these are not the most searched terms this year. They're the terms most-searched-for that had not previously been much-searched-for.

Ultimately, there is a certain amount of arbitrariness in this ranking, since they have to trade-off relative-to-last-year search frequency and absolute search frequency of the terms.

Celebrities and consumer products a) appeal to the widest demographic of people and b) are more quickly changing than most other things, and seeing how this list is entirely based on year over year percentage change in search volume it makes a lot of sense.

So, apparently the 9 fastest falling search terms of 2011 are social networking sites.

Google thinks 'honey badger' searches are science-related?

http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en/top-lists/us/science/faste...

The site breaks for me after I drill down into one of the entries. Links to other entries don't work and the main menu doesn't either.

Is this just me? I'm on the latest Chrome on OS X.

I see a lot of " Lorem ipsum dolor sit..." (literally) in the page source. Is this deliberate?

Doesn't anyone find that strange. When I post a link to Zeitgeist on Facebook all I see is "Lorem ipsum ..." For a screenshot see: http://imgur.com/Don3P

Google are feeding Facebook servers fake data/page content I presume.

There's an Android robot planking on the page.

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