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Google Recaps 2001
fm6 writes: "Google has suplemented their usual weekly Zeitgeist update with a lovely 2001 Timeline. Particularly interesting to see how the usual queries about celebrities and sports suddenly
disappeared in favor of searches about recent event -- although
people seem to put Nostradamus in the later category."
And in other news Slashdot recaps recaps of 2001.
Doesn't it seem more logical at just type in http://www.cnn.com ?
Oh yeah. People are stupid.
Adversive
My cat's breath smells like cat food.
How unamerican,
Back in the day, when I was naturalized as a US
citizen, people had an objective look towards life.
But after years of CNN, reality TV and Sports entertainment shows;
i guess they are starting to develop a sixth sense for bullshit.
Voodoo will determine the outcome of the next election results,
and maybe, maybe the IRS will take coconut for tax-payment.
Consider a Harry Potter movie that starred Britney Spears and Nostradamus (hmm, he's dead, we'll have to go with the next choice, Osama Bin Laden as the male lead), with the two remaining Beatles composing the music (which will be simultaneously released on Morpheus), utilizing Windows XP as the OS for the animation effects with the CounterStrike rendering engine. Nokia and Amazon will be major sponsors, with their logos splashed on all attire and walls. CNN will be the primary media outlet for press releases regarding this movie, with tennis star Anna Kournikova doing the reporting.
If any producers are interested in doing this, give me a call. It'll be just fab, baby!
Top Holiday Searches 2001:
:) -- is a traditional English language word.
1. christmas
2. navidad
3. hanukkah
4. weihnachtskarten
5. adventskalender
Interesting to see that only one of the above five words -- or perhaps two of five, depending on your opinions of hanukkah
It's beginning to look a lot more like an international net. Will Cantonese words top the list by '05? '10?
-Patrick
Someone needs to remind their graph-maker how many days there are in February...
Google timeline... Hey I guess they really do pay attention to the search querries at these engines. Now that they know what we're thinking, will they be forced to act on piracy searches? I wonder if they send the ips out to the government of people looking for stuff they shouldn't be.
I have a site that gets a lot of traffic from Google because of articles and such, but even writing about warez gets me hits from people looking to get pirated software. What are the ethics here? Does Google or any search engine have to publish the IPs to the government of people looking for stuff they shouldn't be?
Side note.. I can actually remember searching for a desktop image on Google that they have in this Zeitgeist. Creepy.
This part of the "Top 20 Gaining Queries" caught my eye:
5. anthrax
6. windows xp
7. osama bin laden
So Windows XP is more popular than osama bin laden but not nearly as popular as anthrax.
Wait 'til the Microsoft Marketing Department gets a hold of this.;-)
I find it sad to see how much tragedies shape our lives. Putting September 11 aside for a moment, the Intimidator was the most often searched for object/person in one month. It was a horrible terrible thing to have happened and it seems everyone became fascinated with it to an extent and began searching google for it.
Add to that September 11th. People again began searching for something that was gone only after it had been destroyed.
Why can't we as Americans.... as people, appreciated the wonderful things we have before they're gone?
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
Is a list of everything I searched for all year. It would be neat to for google to allow you to sign-in and record what you are looking for. You need not sign-in if you are looking for something that you don't want recorded.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
I'm kinda curious about the other search engines. I don't really think they would be too different because I also believe most people aren't aware of the cache option on google. I know I really didn't notice it till I became a slashdot regular. (BTW, thanks to all who do point out these goodies to us)
1. anna kournikova
I wonder how many were in the new image search engine"Get them before they get....
Interesting that Loft Story is the more popular TV request. For those who don't know Loft Story was the French version of Big Brother, with only a few variation.
The funny thing is that we actually got a couple fucking (there was a hottie stripper among the candidate, she eventually won, search for Loana), and if it was not shown on TV, the whole thing eventually leaked as MPEGs on the Internet (filmed in infrared :-)), so all those Loft Story request where really people looking for pr0n...
This year has been one of the worst years I can remember in my entire life. Good riddance, this year sucked a big one and kept on sucking. Lets have a look at my timeline:
January: I go into debt.
February: Work stress piles up, I go further into debt.
March: The dickhead who was managing PROPAGANDA's SQL database decides to "upgrade" the box and torches damn near a thousand articles. I rebuild from scratch in my spare time with the help of some friends.
April: A girl gets butchered and raped in the apartment across the walkway from me. I stay until 10:30 or so to see what the news crews have learned, and decide to stay the night over at Ginger's place because I'm too creeped out about the whole thing. I give a taped statement to the police about what I may have heard or seen the night before. I leave, and just as I head out, I see them bringing the body bag out, and see the outline of the girl's head in the bag and damn near throw up. I spend the next week or so living with Ginger until I can get a chance to arrange to move to a new complex.
May: I move to a new, secure, gated apartment complex. The apartment manager at my old apartment complex refuses to break anyone's lease, and refuses let anyone out. He also refuses to allow anyone to pay off the remainder of their lease. I'm screwed for $3000, and spend the next 6 months paying off two apartments. Hired a lawyer in preparation to sue my former apartment complex to get out of the lease. It doesn't work. I talk to a news crew and light a fire under their ass, that still doesnt work. Ultimately, i'm screwed for three grand, and now carry $1100 a month in rent expenses. Thank god I work at IBM.
June: I find out my new neighbor at the new apartment complex wears a monitoring bracelet around his ankle. Wonderful. He also wears a two foot long tattoo across his midsection. This kid is 19 years old. Work stress continues as rumors circulate through IBM that contractors are about to get the axe..Myself included.
July: Laid off. IBM cuts 40% of their workforce here in town. Everyone I know is out of work. The economy tanks hard as the dot-com loser bubble bursts. My convicted-felon neighbor has a screaming argument outside on his balcony. His girlfriend jumps off the third story balcony and ends up being carried out on a stretcher. The police take another statement from me about what I might have heard or seen. They chuckle at my bad luck after I tell them where I lived a few months ago. I figure a piano is going to fall through the ceiling and kill me one of these days.
August: Mad rush to take shelter in classes at the local college to wait out the storm. Just barely get onboard in time. Word trickles out of IBM that nobody expects to be re-hired until early 2002. Great. Now I have to ask my parents for financial help, and will continue to rely on them for the next 4 months.
September: Mr. Roger's retires, the world explodes, and Ginger calls me up at 7 in the morning and tells me the World Trade Center is on fire. I watch as another plane hits, and what we thought at the time to be 30 to 40,000 people fall to their deaths on fire and pulverized by concrete. The entire country goes to hell in a handbasket. I can count the number of UNIX-related job openings on one hand. I prepare Ginger for the idea that I may have to move to Colorado to find work. Theres one company up there still hiring.
October: My car dies...A broken crank shaft that would cost more to repair than the entire vehicle was worth. Now I need to get a new car while paying off two apartments. Thankfully, this is the last month I'll have to pay rent in two different places. The new car costs $5K, and automatically dumps my head in the debt bucket and holds it under the water for the next few months. I start making the rounds of people I may have unjustly skewered over the past year or two with little success.. Whatever jobs were open have all now dried up as the industry tightens its belt and locks the door for the long run. Anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax, anthrax.
November: A glimmer of hope. I run into a former coworker at a car wash, and beg her to bring word back that I've been holding out for months waiting to get back on the boat at IBM. More debt, more stress. Thank god I've got Ginger.
December: Cant go home for Christmas and be with my family because of Osama. Parents don't want me on a plane. Things start to settle down, i'm getting used to the idea of being unemployed. Just as I do, I get a call from a contractor firm that Big Blue as opened its doors. I do backflips and cartwheels and have my name on the dotted line within 45 minutes. The light at the end of the tunnel appears and Dick Clark looks like he's aged alot in the past year.
Good fucking riddance, 2001. I hope I forget you quickly.
Bowie J. Poag
...is a list of everything you searched for all year, available to anyone (spouse, employer, neighbors...). So you'd have to make sure that Google kept your information absolutely secure. Good thing Internet sites have such a stellar reputation for that.
"In other news, Joe Blow of 327 Maple Street was charged with last year's rape and murder of Jane Doe of Alta Vista. Officials said that the big break in the case came when a subpoena of Google search records for area residents turned up evidence that the terms "rape", "weapons", and "attack" had been used in searches from Blow's home computer. Mr. Blow is being held without bond while police search for additional damning evidence against this psychopathic killer..."
"Update: Jailed rapist and killer Joe Blow appears to have escaped conviction for his 2000 rape and murder of Alta Vista resident Jane Doe, as after three months of searching, officials have failed to uncover additional evidence from his well-covered trail. The DA's office has sworn that this vicious criminal will not go unpunished, however, since they'e sure they can find something in his Google search records that will indicate some felony involvement in something or other."
I saw LOTR on the gigantic IMAX screen at the Montreal Famous Player's theatre. Wasn't "Holy Fucking Shit" good (as exclaimed by some /. lusers), but decent. Anyhow, if you're posting here during the New Year's countdown, I pity you.
How many people know how to type www.google.com into their browser, but then have to search to find amazon.com and never even think to type www.amazon.com?
dumbshits I guess?
YES, there is a McDonald's in Hanoi Square.
Set yahoo.com as someones homepage and they think that the only way to get anywhere is the search bar.
With a lead filled snow shoe!
That last bit should have been "...looking for information on narcotics is _not_ illegal
Unless you forgot, voodoo determined the LAST presidental outcome!
Yes, the 5th of may, but what the hell is "Cindo de Mayo"???
Oh shit! I forgot to click "Post Anonymously"...
A killer feature would be to be able to upload a sample of you hummin or singing a song and have Google make a search for the title of that song :)
Guvf vf abg n EBG zrffntr
I think every web site owner who reads their logs faithfully can relate a story of users' being referred to the site through a Google search on something completely unrelated. I remember a while back when an entry I had on Diaryland which said something like "Then my drunk girlfriend and her three drunk apartmentmates stopped by" reached Google, I started getting hits literally DAILY referred by a search on "drunk girls."
Diarylanders find the phenomenon so amusing that there's now a site dedicated to it: OddGoogle.
grep -ri 'should work'
Why is Britney Spears most searched for?
Real men look at REAL porn.
Pr0n. It would have spanned the entire timeline and really put everything in perspective. Instead, i'll do it.
Number 1 search on new years day. Pr0n. Valentines day. Pr0n. Mothers day. Pr0n. Fathers day. Pr0n. Fourth of July. Pr0n. All summer. Pr0n. Haloween. Pr0n. Thanksgiving. Pr0n. Every holiday. Pr0n. That's only the important dates too!
Life is like pants... fit in or you don't fit in.
With all those July searches for Chandra Levy, don't you think SOMEBODY would have found her?
Happy NEW year Bowie, and good luck with it .. (btw, does anyone else find it interesting that the original post was marked Funny? hehe..)
Why did this get rejected for me a couple of weeks ago:
* 2001-12-20 22:49:07 Year-End Google Zeitgeist (articles,internet) (rejected)
but now they are posting it? It also took them 5 days to reject the story.
The number 1 man sought for on the Internet was Nostradamus (an alchemist with a reputation of being a prophet, though his predictions are so obscure that hindsight even doesn't help), and the second most sought man on the internet was Osama bin Ladin.
;)
With all those people searching for Osama bin Ladin, do you think we will find him>
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Same here. Layoffs, lawsuits, old people's scary and potentially deadly diseases striking our young workforce, friends and relatives dying, more layoffs, more lawsuits, insurance companies not coming across, key developers leaving, parents suddenly showing old age, divorces, more deaths, creditors on every side; not to mention national tragedy & being a citizen of a country that doesn't know when to quit bombing... heck one of us even got snakebit & nearly lost a leg. 2001, you weren't what you were supposed to be. Some details slightly changed to mislead the bad luck demons because there are still 11.5 hours left in this doomladen year and I for one want to spend them under the bed.
With all that searching America did for Chandra Levy, it's amazing that nobody found her. Doesn't reflect well on the quality of Google as a search engine.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
What I love about them is they gained popularity, the service held like it was before, and heck, look at the start page, do you see load of useless stuff? do you see loads of banner adds, buttons, "options that you never go thru", images, etc? no. They kept it clean, simple, fast to load, and they've managed even to make it cute (noticed how many times the google logo changed since 2 weeks)
:)
I just hope it will stay that way because THAT'S the way it should be for people like us that wants to get something fast and to the point without having to code an SQL query form in the input search
Kudos to Google.
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
I'm suprised to see the AC-130 in the Top Searches related to the war on terrorism. Its not the most common aircraft and it seems like many people haven't heard of them. It kinda suprised me that they haven't been using any A-10s in the war. I guess that range to target would have cut down a bit on their loiter time since we didn't exactly have any close airfields. Hrmmm...maybe they could make an AC-130 with a GAU-8/A Avenger cannon...heheheh...what impractical fun that could be! :)
Yah, really. :) At first I was sort of insulted that someone thought my miserable year was "funny", but, I did too. More than once this year, I remember looking at my situation and just laughing hysterically at how miserably bad everything had turned so quickly. So bad its comical.
Bowie J. Poag
OK, I think this is just made up and not based on seaches at all. I think we all know that if this was based on search engine queries it would look something like this:
January to December: porn & warez.
Yet neither school girl wet slut lesbians or crack whore dick suckers gets a look in for the whole year.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
According to this Jupiter media Metrix report, google is not anywhere near the most popular search engines in 2001 .Yahoo and MSN still tkae up 60-70% of all the searches made
I'm not sure that I follow the reference to the canidian wireless group at the headers, but the folks at seattlewireless have been talking about this for over a month.
a ck
http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/Wap11H
...are people searching for CNN?
c h. html
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist/9-11-sear
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
In case you didn't know, you can go to Metaspy to view searches that are underway on Metafind. I saw a similar link for Google once, but I don't remember where it is. Metafind isn't Google, but its searches show pretty much the same trends this story shows.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Great for media metrix. The stats reports I see, for a number of sites with 1 million+ hits / month, indicate that Google is more popular than all other search engines put together. These sites don't appeal to a particuarly tech-savvy audience either.
I don't want Google keeping lists of everything I personally have searched for. I'd be less likely to use it. Plus, what's the point? That's something I would expect from a shady .NET operation like MSN, but not Google.
A better idea would be: I type in a search term, and at at the top of the search results page, I get one of those little graphs showing me the history of the search term I typed in over the past several weeks/months/years. I bet they could do this, or at least provide it as an option, and I think it would have some real usefulness.
My faith in the intellect of fellow net users was challenged by the finding that 6,200 people couldn't figure out what CNN's URL was on September 11th.
Though, I like to think the fact their servers ground to a halt (along with every other news agencies) had something to do with it. Maybe people assumed they got the address wrong when nothing came up.
Or so I hope.
Noodle Recipes 2001
Observations from 50,000 feet: I'm glad to see that Regis and His Millions are likely to get the plug pulled. Freeing up Google so my images.google.com searces work, um, faster. "eagle" is #3 most searched image after the attack. I wonder how many people then found out that they wanted a bald eagle. I want to know how many people queried "Where is Chandra Levy?". The Internet Knows All. Proof that address bars are not the navigation of choice: Top 9/11 Query: "CNN". Google Knows All. Powerball. Google searchers do not find magic numbers before drawing. Google Does Not Know All. Proof Brick and Mortar=Peace of Mind on the Web: Amazon not in top searches for retailers. Or maybe someone discovered address bar. Whoah, Nicole Kidman is free! No one searched for X10! However will I find such a product? Most Importantly, All Your Base...
So where are all the millenium parties? Oops, I forgot that the media invented last new years day as the start of the new millenium. (remember, there was no year 0 AD)
My website has a URL. I decided to replace the URL with a uniform resource locator. It's better.
If you don't understand any of my sayings, come to me in private and I shall take you in my German mouth.
You could use a browser that remembered form entries and prompted you with their values last time-- it would have much the same effect.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
Don't know about overall term ranking, but quite a few search engines allow you to view what people are searching for right now. Try metacrawler's "metaspy" for one example.
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
It's not the Seattle earthquake, it's the Olympia Earthquake :) They were looking for the one broken window in Seattle when Olympia had real damage. Bleh, get it right =P
The spike in Nostradamus searches could be people checking to see if he predicted the WTC disaster. Or, maybe it was the phony prediction that the village idiot (George Bush) becomes the leader in new millennium.
Shouldn't the "top retailers" section actually be called "retailers with the hardest-to-remember URL's"?
Amazing magic tricks
My favorite part is how they customize their graphic depending on the holiday that's coming up :)
Take a look today and see their New Years graphics. I know that Thanksgiving had one too, and probably other holidays.
Top 10 Sports Queries
;-)
2001
1. anna kournikova
Ofcourse. I'm very sure those searches were for the sporting capabilities of Anna Kournikova. The question is, which sport?
And let's not even get started on the pathetic explosion of "Nostradamus" searches. Oh, whoops, too late.
America searches for "ellis island" and its roots as the archive of immigration records goes online.
;)
Awesome...my company hosts that site...
DennyK
Actually, the original show was also called Big Brother and was developed and first produced in the Netherlands.