Wednesday, July 30, 2008

It's that time of year again: Google's Zeitgeist results for 2007 are out. Search is so much a part of our daily lives that the terms and trends of these keywords become quite fascinating.

No surprise, then, that Facebook was the fastest rising UK search term of 2007, closely followed by YouTube, Bebo and MySpace. Club Penguin, Wikipedia, Stardoll, Gumtree, wiki and eBaty made up the top ten.

Quite why you'd search for them rather than typing their name and ..com' in the browser, I have no idea. But that's partly how Google built up its fortune, I guess.

Google's Zeitgeist report is tellingly short of hard stats, but it does reveal that up to 25% of searches on any typical day are brand new search terms. The long tail will only ever get longer then. That might also show that users are getting more sophisticated with their searches, perhaps getting comfortable with search syntax like speech marks and site-specific searches (that's "site:", FYI).

Countrywide, Google picked out the top searches for specific cities, which are rather intriguing. Farnborough mostly looked for love this year, Cambridge looked for beer and Oxford for David Cameron. And takeaways were the top priority in Bristol.

zeitgeist3dec2007.jpg

Anyone looking for a business idea might want to try and disrupt some of the following markets: Bargain hunters spent most of their Google time looking for cheap flights, holidays, car insurance, laptops, hotels, travel insurance, loans, train tickets, cars and mobile phones.

Ronaldo has the dubious distinction of being the most hated search term, followed by "i hate men" and "i hate school", while film, movies and techno got the most love. I'm not with them on the techno bit.

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