CYBERSPACE – What do Paris Hilton, Hezbollah, refinancing, cancer, hurricane Katrina, the World Cup, Carisoprodol, and Borat have in common? According to Google, all are among the top search terms and hot search trends of 2006.Google’s year-end Zeitgeist report, released Tuesday, includes a variety of lists and charts tracking the “most popular and fastest-rising global search terms that people have typed into Google.com,” according to a statement published by Google.
“Google search queries, when seen in volume, tend to reflect what is collectively on our minds day in and day out,” the company observed in its statement.
If that’s true, then the world has social networking and video-sharing websites, celebrities and pharmaceuticals on its collective mind, front and center.
Topping the list of top overall searches was “bebo,” queries concerning social networking site Bebo.com, searches for which finished one spot ahead of “myspace,” users ostensibly seeking out Bebo’s much larger competitor, MySpace.com.
Sports fans in search on information about the world’s most popular sporting event made “world cup” the #3 overall query on Google, with “metacafe” (a video sharing site ala YouTube.com) coming in at #4, and “radioblog” at the fifth spot.
Google reports that two celebrities, Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom, topped the list of searches submitted to Google News, followed by queries related to a disparate set of topics, including disease (“cancer” at #3), a hot online trend (“podcasting,” #4) disasters both natural (“hurricane Katrina,” #5) and financial (“bankruptcy,” at #6), a tennis player (“Martina Hingis,” #7) more disease (“autism,” #8), the latest crop of professional football rookies (“2006 NFL draft,” #9) and reality television (“celebrity big brother 2006” at #10).
Under the heading “What’s Hot,” Google’s Zeitgeist report indicates that its users the world over want to know more about a satirical fake journalist (“who is Borat”), a political/terrorist movement backed by Iran (“who is Hezbollah” and “what is Hezbollah” both rank high), and a number of pharmaceuticals; the top 10 list of “what is” queries for 2006 includes seven pharmaceuticals: Carisoprodol, Acyclovir, Alprazolam, Tramadol, Hydrocodone, Vicodin and Xanax.
None of the lists published by Google Zeitgeist include any overtly adult entertainment-related or “pornographic” searches (arguably, some of the “Paris Hilton” searches likely were made in furtherance of locating her infamous sex video, though).
For more information, check out Google’s 2006 year-end Zeitgeist at http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2006.html
The main Google Zeitgeist page can be found at: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist.html
