This year marks our 11th annual look back at the searches that compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across many countries around the world. For our 2011 Zeitgeist site, we’ve improved the visualizations to make it easy to compare terms across categories, added detailed infographics for an immersive dive into the data and created a video overview of the search terms that captivated the world this year.
What were they? As it turns out, all around the world, we were excited for the weekend. Web celeb Rebecca Black was the #1 fastest rising query globally, as fans searched for information about the “Friday” singer. She wasn’t the only songstress to capture international attention this year: Adele made the fastest rising lists in over 15 countries spread across five continents, in addition to claiming a spot on our global list. Reality star Ryan Dunn, defendantCasey Anthony and tech luminary Steve Jobs also made our list, as people of interest took five of the top 10 spots.
When looking at the data, it is fascinating to see the cultural fads and trends that took over the globe, from cupcakes (making top food lists in over a dozen countries) to the Dukan diet and high-profile weddings, but Google was used for much more than staying up to date on the sisters Middleton and Kardashian. From local celebrities in Finland to Singaporeans looking for news on the revolutions in Egypt and Libya half a world away, people turned to Google to learn more about what was happening on the world stage. It wasn’t just the man-made moments that topped the charts this year, but also the natural disasters that literally shook the world, from Hurricane Irene in the U.S. to the earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan.
Terms related to the Japanese earthquake showed up on lists from almost half of the countries included in the 2011 Zeitgeist, including Japan, where 地震 (earthquake) topped the country’s fastest rising list, and our global list, where 東京 電力(TEPCO, owners of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant), became the first non-Latin term to ever make our global fastest-rising list. In addition to news about what had happened, people around the world also looked for ways to give: In the U.S., the top three searches related to charitable giving were about helping Japan.
I love search, and to me, it’s exciting to learn more about people in other countries by looking at what they search for—from the most searched for Swiss mountain peaks in Switzerland tosoccer terms in Argentina and the stuff of Italian dreams. As the proud owner of a Miniature Schnauzer, I was pleased to see that dogs always beat cats on lists of popular pets, but was surprised to learn that in Russian the most searched for pet was pygmy giraffes (which don’t really exist but are very cute) and in the U.S., sugar gliders made the list.
We hope you enjoy learning more about what people around the world and in your country were searching for in 2011.
Tag Archive for dreams
Official Google Blog: Zeitgeist 2011: How the world searched
Dreams and Reality
Anybody who visits this site realizes that it’s an aggregator of my favorite blog posts. I don’t normally post here. But today I have to rant. Not at anything in particular, more at myself.
I’m sure you’ve had this happen to yuo – everyone does. You wake up from a dream, whether in the middle of the night or in the morning and think to yourself “that’s a great idea, I should write that down” only to realize that you a) don’t have a pen or paper next to you or, b) realize it’s too dark to see to write it or c) by the time you solve a) and b) you’ve forgotten the idea.
Well that happened to me last night.
You see, we’ve been having issues with our websites. I think someone is trying to hack or DOS us, so our sites have been suffering. Not going down, just really slow. And when they get slow, I get IM’s emails and text messages on my phone. So imagine my (lack of) surprise when my cell phone rang it’s annoying “you have a new text” chime at 4 AM.
Of course I was deep asleep and (sad enough) dreaming about work. You know it’s bad when you even dream about work meetings.
Anyways, in my dream I had one of those great ideas, but as usual, no pen or paper nearby so I made a mental note to remember it. Sometimes this works for me but today, sadly it did not.
I remember bits of the “idea”. It had to do with tracking visitors that come to our site and how they use it – what pages they view, how long etc. (I know – lame. But like I said – was work related). I also remember it was a simple idea – something we could implement very easily for little cost and overhead and it would provide us a wealth of information.
Now, I know what you are saying – it’s my fault for not keeping that pen and paper on my night stand, but in my defence I must tell you that I have done that in the past – kept the pen and paper nearby. And I have even used it, only to wake the next morning to chicken scratch which is impossible to decipher, or something like “red tomoatoes”. WTF??? Could it be any more cryptic? Obviously I knew what I meant at 3 AM but in the light of day – not so much.
So here I sit, at my desk at work (yes I’m writing this at work. Shh don’t tell my boss. Or better yet – do tell. Maybe then I won’t have to hear my cell phone go off in the morning ever again) trying to remember this great idea.
And why is that? The harder you try, the further away the idea seems to get? It’s like the friggin’ thing has legs and knows I’m in pursuit and says “Uh uh – you’re not going to catch me that easy”.
So that’s my rant – I do feel a little better now, but still don’t remember that great idea. Too bad cause I think there were a few of them in the “meeting”.
