Posted on Sunday, 8th January 2012 by Bill Bean
A good working definition of zeitgeist is “spirit of the times.” It does seem fair to say that what got Googled would be an interesting, if not accurate, reflection of our zeitgeist; a cultural barometer. Google has shared with us the fastest rising searches of 2011. Per Google here is the picture of what had our attention:
It might be fair to say that the results were a bit skewed, though their sample size was enormous (billions of searches), and the presence of Google+ is a bit suspect. Sorry, Facebook. Obviously, many who read this might not have cared (cared enough to search) about any one of these items. Must have been your coworkers.
We often wonder what a future alien race (join me in my presupposition) will think of us when they find artifacts from our civilization (eg a thigh master). This is one of those things. What will they think of us when they pull up our collective browser history?
Again, these were the fastest rising searches in 2011. This is not a list of the most often searched terms. That list would have to include things like weather, porn, poker, flights, etc…. Nevertheless, there are some remarkable things from 2011 missing from this particular list. If you visit the page, you’ll see other collections such as fastest falling and category specific lists of fastest rising searches. They also break it down geographically, so you can see the United States specific lists. Seems I should have been paying more attention. Who is Ryan Dunn?
Fascinating stuff. The numbers tell a story.
Image Source: http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/
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