Slashdot Mirror
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."
Actually, the top four queries were all women: Spears, Hilton, Aguilera, Anderson. I think they image search results might be skewing the data. :D
Britney Spears is the top search..and scroll down a bit to "top company searches" to see that SCO is in the lead. This confirms my theory that people are fascinated with stupidity in all it's forms.
maybe because there is a world outside the US ?
:/
And the world series for cricket really does mean world series, not all the teams in the US and 4 from Canada.. North America isn't the world.
So you take the population of India about 1/4th and ask them what their favorite pasttime is.. it's cricket. combine that with sri lanka, south africa, australia, england etc.. and you get a lot of people who have internet access etc, know about google and search for events regarding a sport thats played by more people than who play baseball/american football, or polo
All but a handful of the top-ranking searches required only one or two familiar keywords to yield meaningful results, a proper name, a place, a single object of interest, such as a sport like cricket.
But will the Zeitgeist total queries that ask the same question in many different ways because users don't know the keywords needed to define and limit their search?
But that shouldn't be surprising at all. If you're a scholar, perhaps you'll search for Marting Heidegger and Jacques Derrida. But hey, maybe not. Maybe you're into computer science and OS design. Or maybe some particular marxist historian, a religious thinker, problems in geology, or the writing of T. S. Eliot or even that of Norman Mailer. But it's pretty fucking unlikely that you're interested in all of these, or that you'd actually believe you could find useful information about Heidegger on the intarweb.
A different person would probably come up with very different examples. You can specialize in lots of stuff, and most of this is of no interest to the general population.
On the other hand, if you're searching for stuff that you're not really that interested in, it's more likely to be on Google's list of top searches. Come to think of it, I'm quite sure I've contributed to the list after thinking: 'Who is Paris Hilton, and why should I care?' I think many people must have been asking the same question this year. Of course, this isn't so much because people are stupid as it is because the media is a huge family of incestuous whores, and Spears, Hilton, et al are perfectly adapted to that environment, as parasites living in the media's collective jizz.