2004 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

krgallagher writes "Google has published their Year-End Zeitgeist. In their own words, 'Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a unique perspective on the year's major events and trends. We hope you enjoy this aggregate look at what people wanted to know more about this year.' The number one search for all of 2004 is britney spears."

Britney

[daniil (775990)]

When will it ever end?

Re:Britney

[superpulpsicle (533373)]

There is actually a mistake. She was also supposed to be on the sports list.

I think I saw this in Nostradomus...

[StressGuy (472374)]

"...and lo, a woman-child child shall be born, and she shall wear a head-dress of round plasic globes on her head as a child....upon the maturation of this child, when the platic globes are removed from her head and become infused in her chest....the end of the world shall surely be near...."

I'm parphrasing...but it's something like that I'm sure :)

Re:Britney

[RespekMyAthorati (798091)]

We should be glad that a fellow geek is so popular: http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm/ [britneyspears.ac].

Re:Britney

[L. VeGas (580015)]

I, for one, am pleased as punch that our young people look up to a hard-working role model like Britney. Did you know that she did the singing on all her albums? She's cute as a button and twice as smart.

All I want for Christmas

[by Anonymous Coward]

Is my browser stats.

(No, I don't want stats from some other site. I want them from the Zeitgeist!)

SCO

[flatface (611167)]

Heh, it's ... nice to see SCO as the top searched-for company. I guess it pays to be in that position, but we're gonna have to wait and see if it changes anything. [slashdot.org]

when will it ever end?

[midol (752608)]

When the human race evolves into an intelligent species?

Moderate Safesearch on or off, you think?

[iopha (626985)]

Actually, the top four queries were all women: Spears, Hilton, Aguilera, Anderson. I think they image search results might be skewing the data. :D

SCO

[basic0 (182925)]

Britney Spears is the top search..and scroll down a bit to "top company searches" to see that SCO is in the lead. This confirms my theory that people are fascinated with stupidity in all it's forms.

The real top 10

[oexeo (816786)]

The unfiltered top 10:

1. britney spears nude
2. paris hilton nude
3. christina aguilera nude
4. pamela anderson nude
5. adult chat
6. games warez
7. carmen electra nude
8. orlando bloom nude
9. harry potter warez
10. mp3 warez

Re:The real top 10

[flatface (611167)]

9. harry potter nude

*runs*

Re:The real top 10

[Ieshan (409693)]

Harry Potter warez?

I mean, that doesn't make any sense, but at least you didn't put "Harry Potter nude", since that would have been really disturbing.

Re:The real top 10

[insomnyuk (467714)]

Actually, it probably looks more like this:

1. brittnay speers nakkid
2. pearis hillton sex
3. crisstina agweelaira boobie


and so on...

Re:The real top 10

[rackhamh (217889)]

To be honest, I expect that when you view the unfiltered results, those top 10 get bumped off the list completely:

1. sex
2. teen sex
3. naughty teen sex
4. naughty teen oral sex
5. naughty lesbian teen oral sex ... and so on.

Bill Hicks

[DarkHelmet (120004)]

This isn't a perfect quotation but...

We have the ability to keep knowledge of some of the greatest minds, and provide that knowledge to everyone? But no! "What's that little girl singing about? Let's put her on a CD, to be kept forever!"

I wish I had the exact quote, but it felt fitting to find out that this is what people want to know about on the Internet.

Lovely.

Oh please, no, no no....

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4 (718736)]

Everyone neither should be or even need be, an intellectual or nerd or scholar or whatever. We need all types of people in this world. But it is kind of scary that the most popular topics on the most popular information 'getter' are:

Geez, everything is entertainment related, with almost no educational value - unless of course the mp3 search is for people looking into how various compression algorithms work. Sometimes, I think I've found the reason why the world is going screwy. Maybe not.

• 1. britney spears
• 2. paris hilton
• 3. christina aguilera
• 4. pamela anderson
• 5. chat
• 6. games
• 7. carmen electra
• 8. orlando bloom
• 9. harry potter
• 10. mp3

key word searches.

[westlake (615356)]

Geez, everything is entertainment related, with almost no educational value

All but a handful of the top-ranking searches required only one or two familiar keywords to yield meaningful results, a proper name, a place, a single object of interest, such as a sport like cricket.

But will the Zeitgeist total queries that ask the same question in many different ways because users don't know the keywords needed to define and limit their search?

Re:Oh please, no, no no....

[MrHanky (141717)]

But that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're a scholar, perhaps you'll search for Marting Heidegger and Jacques Derrida [google.com]. But hey, maybe not. Maybe you're into computer science and OS design [google.com]. Or maybe some particular marxist historian, a religious thinker, problems in geology, or the writing of T. S. Eliot or even that of Norman Mailer. But it's pretty fucking unlikely that you're interested in all of these, or that you'd actually believe you could find useful information about Heidegger on the intarweb.

A different person would probably come up with very different examples. You can specialize in lots of stuff, and most of this is of no interest to the general population.

On the other hand, if you're searching for stuff that you're not really that interested in, it's more likely to be on Google's list of top searches. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure I've contributed to the list after thinking: 'Who is Paris Hilton, and why should I care?' I think many people must have been asking the same question this year. Of course, this isn't so much because people are stupid as it is because the media is a huge family of incestuous whores, and Spears, Hilton, et al are perfectly adapted to that environment, as parasites living in the media's collective jizz.

Re:Oh please, no, no no....

[Anne_Nonymous (313852)]

Top 10 Searches by the /. Cognoscente

1. network propagation theory
2. themes in byzantine art
3. rna transcription chemistry
4. bletchley park
5. kafkan high modernism
6. plank's constant
7. differential analysis on manifolds with corners
8. kurosawa and the japanese literary tradition
9. hyaluronic acid stabilizers
10. britney spears

Disappointment again.

[caluml (551744)]

I'm rather upset that I don't even appear in the top 10 popular men. When will people recognise me? Maybe I'll have to kill a bunch of people...?

Browser information

[jez9999 (618189)]

Wow, this zeitgeist really sucks now. It's focused on nothing but search info, which I guess is expected from Google - but demographic information be damned, it seems. They should be looking to gather more information on things like browser, OS, country, etc. Just throwing a load of search terms on a page isn't particularly compelling, especially when they're all so predictable.

Re:Browser information

[r00zky (622648)]

In previous years they did exactly that

Where's that data for this year?

Without it all this crap is near useless.

Re:Browser information

[fred_sanford (678924)]

They used to report on those statistics but stopped after the news sites started quoting them as official sources.

Something kind of scary

[SuperKendall (25149)]

The #2 item on local health searches is "hospital". You can just picture millions of people turning to Google before thinking of dialing 911!!

please explain?

[vida (695022)]

britney spears is the most popular query, but it's 4th on the list of public figures, while paris hilton did not even make the list.

On the tech stuff category, *kazaa* is the first one and *mp3* the third one, yet *kazaa* did not even make it to the most popular queries one, while mp3 is the tenth string most searched for.

There are also other inconsistencies, between for example the *most popular male* category and *most popular male celebrity*. (btw, what's the diff?)

Can somebody shed some insight into this?

Re:please explain?

[caerwyn (38056)]

google.com queries at the top are separated from the news.google.com queries (next section down), and the results for the two are different.

Predictions for 2005?

[bigberk (547360)]

It's clear now. We'll be seeing a lot more of britney spears and paris hilton in bikinis, mini skirts and prom dresses... possibly while they watch CNN, the simpsons, or listen to 'YMCA' on their ipods.

Presidential elections

[eln (21727)]

So since George W. Bush was the number one public figure search, and John Kerry was third, behind Janet Jackson, can we assume that if Janet Jackson had run for president, she would have had a better chance of winning than John Kerry?

Maybe if the elections were held closer to the Superbowl.

One word searches?

[JustinXB (756624)]

Do people actually use one word searches? Or are these just the most popular searched words? Or does Google aggergate all the different searches into categories? (e.g. "brittney spears CD" and "brittney spears lipsync" ends up as "brittney spears")

google as a "pseudo" DNS service

[dgerman (78602)]

What I find interesting is that some people use google to go ebay, cnn, bbc. Many people are using google not as a search engine, but as a quicker way to get to a site than typing www.cnn.com (or even cnn.com). I find it hard to believe that sooo many people don't know the URL for ebay or cnn. Even the BBC has a .com domain!

It might have to do with the fact that many people use google as their home page (or have a google search box in the browser).

how to spell Britney

[maharg (182366)]

http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html [google.com]

Oh Crap!!

[cOdEgUru (181536)]

What a frickin time to release such a list when my wife's standing behind me wondering what the hell is keeping me while being devoid of any interest towards what she is saying:

Paris Hilton, Britney, Carmen and Pamela.. Oh Crap!!

I turn around in time to see her look turn in to disgust with the "You and your pervert buddies scored yet again this year!!" before she stomped off in to the kitchen..

Aaargh..time to take care of the History folder..

Amazon?!?

[FunWithHeadlines (644929)]

Under Popular Consumer Brand Name it lists companies such as EBay and Amazon. Huh? Is there a person alive who doesn't know how to get to EBay or Amazon? (hint, the word you're typing in Google? Try it in your Address bar of the browser). This is almost as inane as print ads that list AOL keywords that are identical to their URL ("www.nbc.com AOL Keyword: nbc")

"Hmmm..I sure have heard a lot about this there Amazon thing. I wonder how to find it online. I know, I'll ask that Google thingamabog."

(Slamming my head against my desk repeatedly)

Interesting...NOT!

[Lodragandraoidh (639696)]

This is my first time looking at this annual data, and the most striking thing about it is how vanilla it is.

There is nothing interesting going on; it appears most people are depressingly mundane in their interests and tastes. Where are all the 'rugged individualists', the 'rebels without a cause'? As much as we pay lip service to our desire to stand-out, we are strangely sheepish.

I am begining to believe Asimov's 'The Marching Morons' is, in fact nonfiction...

This is why all marketing is incredibly stupid, because it is based on the most common attribute in order to maximize profits.

Conversely, we have the technology today to automate the personalization of products - which, strange as it may seem, would actually produce more profit (consider, not only would we gather all of the vanilla folks, we would also pull in those wanting unique attributes: X + Y > X every time). Yet most, if not all businesses refrain from this approach.

Given that - this data is useless to me, other than to make me look around at my fellow men and women for the tell-tale vacuous stare.

Re:Interesting...NOT!

[isomeme (177414)]

I am begining to believe Asimov's 'The Marching Morons' is, in fact nonfiction...

Not Asimov, but rather C. M. Kornbluth [hycyber.com]. Quite a scary story.

Sex

[zapfie (560589)]

With pornography and sex related items being some of the most popular queries for search engines, why do they never seem to make it in to Google Zeitgeist?

Re:cricket?

[vluther (5638)]

maybe because there is a world outside the US ?
And the world series for cricket really does mean world series, not all the teams in the US and 4 from Canada.. North America isn't the world.

So you take the population of India about 1/4th and ask them what their favorite pasttime is.. it's cricket. combine that with sri lanka, south africa, australia, england etc.. and you get a lot of people who have internet access etc, know about google and search for events regarding a sport thats played by more people than who play baseball/american football, or polo :/

Re:cricket?

[vluther (5638)]

the amount of internet cafe's, plus NRI's (Non Resident Indians).. the amount of Indians online who want to know about how the national indian cricket team is doing is larger than the population of New England. Plus add to that, the this is whats popular on Google, not the world. American sports, or anything televised on american tv, comes with a website.. mlb.com, nba.com, nfl.com .. cricket.com is a parked page for someone looking to make millions from a domain sale. Same reason why Euro 2004 was so high,

Re:cricket?

[cLive ;-) (132299)]

Would it surprise you to find that New England has about half the number of internet users as India?

Population of New England [economagic.com]: 14,205,480 (2003)

Indian internet users [64.233.161.104]: 18,500,000 (2004)

So, assuming 65-70% of New England population use the internet, New England has roughly 9 million internet users.

And Indian access is growing at a very resonable rate. I see no reason why it won't hit 50,000,000 by 2006.

Add to that the country's obsession with cricket, and it's understandable - imagine the fan bases of

Re:cricket?

[spisska (796395)]

The rules of cricket are actually quite simple, and deftly explained here. [britainexpress.com]

The Rules of Cricket as Explained to a foreign visitor

You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.

Each man that's in the side that's in, goes out, and when he's out, he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out.

When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.

Sometimes you get men still in and not out.

When both sides have been in and out including the not-outs, that's the end of the game.

This description of the game is remarkably accurate.

Re:Porn

[bigberk (547360)]

That's because their zeitgeist is more of a pop culture / marketing / fun-review-of-trends thing. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

Re:Not many women use Google

[jxyama (821091)]

>Carmen Electra, and I don't even know what she did this year that would draw so many searches

do you really have to ask [google.com]? (NSFW)

Re:zeitgeist?

[raju1kabir (251972)]

because zeitgeist is not a native english word?

It's in the dictionary [reference.com], what more do you want? My suspicion is that you're just angry because someone used a word you didn't know.

And what's a "native English word" anyway? Would "man" qualify? That's German too. How about "detail"? That's French. "Pajama"? Whoops, Persian.

Re:zeitgeist?

[raju1kabir (251972)]

i knew what the word meant. i'm not angry. i just think the use of "marginal" words just to jazz things up is not helpful or necessary.

And I think it's wonderful. It helps elevate writing into art instead of mere formulaic transmission of information. And the incredible variety of words is what makes English such a delightfully expressive language. It's a gift to be reveled in, and my hat's off to Google for selecting the perfect word for the occasion.

and, please, you knew well what i meant by "native" english word. to equate "man" and "zeitgeist" as both being "german" (thus not "native") is idiotic.

I don't get the distinction you're trying to draw. Both words came from German. One is used more often than the other. Does that make it more native? What, specifically, is your definition of nativeness in a language where almost all words are borrowed?

the fact you had to pull up a dictionary entry to show "zeitgeist" is even there shows that. do you even doubt for a second that the word "summary" is in the dictionary? how about "man"?

I didn't "have" to; I linked to it so that you could see it was there, because you seemed to be having vocabulary problems.

Re:zeitgeist?

[Frohboy (78614)]

If you don't understand why they're using it, I don't think you fully appreciate what zeitgeist means.

It is pretty much the only word we have that conveys the notion of "spirit of the times". (It would literally translate as "time ghost".) In some sense, it was the lack of a suitable word in english that resulted in the german word being added to our dictionary.

A "year-end summary" doesn't properly convey the idea that we are seeing a snapshot of the underlying culture and interests of the period.

Re:zeitgeist?

[raju1kabir (251972)]

or "zeitgeist is a native word, just like 'man' is because they are both german!!!"

Wow, your reading comprehension is really bad.

Re:zeitgeist?

[Golias (176380)]

If the tone of your origian post wasn't expressing irritation at Google gittin' all fancy-like with them there thirty-cent words, perhaps you would not have been subjected to such a humiliating barrage of people pointing out your ignorance.

For that matter, if (as you now claim) you genuinely were curious about the distiction between "zeitgeist" and "summary," you could have looked it up at dictionary.com or m-w.com yourself, and spared yourself from a brief (but festive) flame-war.

Zeitgeist might not be

Re:zeitgeist?

[capnjack41 (560306)]

unless there's a nuance that cannot be conveyed by the word "summary" but can be by "zeitgeist" (which i see none in the context of describing the google article), using a "fancier" word is not really necessary, IMO

Why did you have to use a fancy old French word like "nuance", instead of just "meaning", which would have worked in that context?

Re:And that trend is:

[TheRaven64 (641858)]

I can't believe eBay was so high up the list. Seriously, how many people google for eBay? Is eBay.com (or ebay.{your country's domain ending here}) that hard to remember?