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."

All I want for Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Is my browser stats.

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

Porn

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn doesn't seem to be in much of the mix. If you look at the 'images', blow-job doesn't even show up.

Oh please, no, no no....

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

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

Browser information

[jez9999]

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.

Something kind of scary

[SuperKendall]

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]

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:Porn

[bigberk]

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:Britney

[RespekMyAthorati]

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

Re:cricket?

[vluther]

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, europeans in the US and other places where it may not have been televised, or televised at a sane hour.. we don't know if this involves google news queries.. people may just want to be checkin up on scores etc. My original post just wanted to state that Cricket is more popular than the original poster may think, and probably on the minds of lot s of people who don't get cricket news on espn/local sports news.

Re:zeitgeist?

[raju1kabir]

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.

One word searches?

[JustinXB]

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]

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).

DogPile

[se2schul]

To see what people are currently searching for live, try Dog Pile Search Spy [dogpile.com]
Some of the searches can be a little disturbing...

Amazon?!?

[FunWithHeadlines]

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)

Re:zeitgeist?

[Golias]

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 a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot, and corporate marketing types (who would be among the most interested in this sort of information) have been using a Hell of a lot, especially in the last decade or so. (One could even say it has entered the national zeitgeist... but that would just be piling on at this point.)

In fact, it would be tough to find an entire issue of Wired magazine which doesn't use the word "zeitgeist" somewhere between the covers.

If you really wanted to insist on a more common word, however, then "fads" might have almost done the trick. Almost.

Linux?

[xeon4life]

If anyone didn't notice, Linux is number 5 on tech stuff searches. If the same people who search for Britney Spears and Spongebob are searching for Linux, maybe it's making a dent.