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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."
When will it ever end?
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Nowhere on that page will you see a single popular search for BSD. You know what this confirms...
Is my browser stats.
(No, I don't want stats from some other site. I want them from the Zeitgeist!)
Porn doesn't seem to be in much of the mix. If you look at the 'images', blow-job doesn't even show up.
Heh, it's ... nice to see SCO as the top searched-for company. I guess it pays to be in that position, but we're gonna have to wait and see if it changes anything.
When the human race evolves into an intelligent species?
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.
The unfiltered top 10:
1. britney spears nude
2. paris hilton nude
3. christina aguilera nude
4. pamela anderson nude
5. adult chat
6. games warez
7. carmen electra nude
8. orlando bloom nude
9. harry potter warez
10. mp3 warez
We have the ability to keep knowledge of some of the greatest minds, and provide that knowledge to everyone? But no! "What's that little girl singing about? Let's put her on a CD, to be kept forever!"
I wish I had the exact quote, but it felt fitting to find out that this is what people want to know about on the Internet.
Lovely.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Geez, everything is entertainment related, with almost no educational value - unless of course the mp3 search is for people looking into how various compression algorithms work. Sometimes, I think I've found the reason why the world is going screwy. Maybe not.
I'm rather upset that I don't even appear in the top 10 popular men. When will people recognise me? Maybe I'll have to kill a bunch of people...?
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Wow, this zeitgeist really sucks now. It's focused on nothing but search info, which I guess is expected from Google - but demographic information be damned, it seems. They should be looking to gather more information on things like browser, OS, country, etc. Just throwing a load of search terms on a page isn't particularly compelling, especially when they're all so predictable.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
why isnt janet jackson classified into the 'women' category?
Where's Rick James, Bitch?!?
/ just sayin'
If you mod me down the terrorists will have won
The #2 item on local health searches is "hospital". You can just picture millions of people turning to Google before thinking of dialing 911!!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"...and lo, a woman-child child shall be born, and she shall wear a head-dress of round plasic globes on her head as a child....upon the maturation of this child, when the platic globes are removed from her head and become infused in her chest....the end of the world shall surely be near...."
:)
I'm parphrasing...but it's something like that I'm sure
A goal is a dream with a deadline
britney spears is the most popular query, but it's 4th on the list of public figures, while paris hilton did not even make the list.
On the tech stuff category, *kazaa* is the first one and *mp3* the third one, yet *kazaa* did not even make it to the most popular queries one, while mp3 is the tenth string most searched for.There are also other inconsistencies, between for example the *most popular male* category and *most popular male celebrity*. (btw, what's the diff?)
Can somebody shed some insight into this?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
It's clear now. We'll be seeing a lot more of britney spears and paris hilton in bikinis, mini skirts and prom dresses... possibly while they watch CNN, the simpsons, or listen to 'YMCA' on their ipods.
So since George W. Bush was the number one public figure search, and John Kerry was third, behind Janet Jackson, can we assume that if Janet Jackson had run for president, she would have had a better chance of winning than John Kerry?
Maybe if the elections were held closer to the Superbowl.
do you really have to ask? (NSFW)
Popular Queries
2004
1. britney spears
2. paris hilton
Top Public Figures
2004
1. george w bush
2. janet jackson
3. john kerry
4. britney spears
Shouldn't britney spears be the top of every list she qualifies for in the zeitgeist if her name is the most popular term overall?
Next year I hear it is going to be google weltschmertz.
[Set Cain on fire and steal his lute.]
how is cricket in the top 10 sports?
Here's why. I got the following off google news. People search for cricket because they want to know just what the hell the following text means.
In Chittagong, Bangladesh, yesterday, Indian off-spinner Harbhajan Singh took the home side's final wicket on the fourth morning to give the visitors victory in the second and final test by an innings and 83 runs and complete a 2-0 series sweep.
Harbhajan had No. 11 batsman Talha Jubair caught at long-on by Irfan Pathan with the fourth delivery of the day, as Bangladesh folded for 124 in its second innings. The home team was 118 for nine overnight after India enforced the follow on, having bowled Bangladesh out for 333 in reply to its first innings of 540.
My only reaction is, "LOL, what?"
the amount of internet cafe's, plus NRI's (Non Resident Indians).. the amount of Indians online who want to know about how the national indian cricket team is doing is larger than the population of New England. Plus add to that, the this is whats popular on Google, not the world. American sports, or anything televised on american tv, comes with a website.. mlb.com, nba.com, nfl.com .. cricket.com is a parked page for someone looking to make millions from a domain sale. Same reason why Euro 2004 was so high, europeans in the US and other places where it may not have been televised, or televised at a sane hour.. we don't know if this involves google news queries.. people may just want to be checkin up on scores etc. My original post just wanted to state that Cricket is more popular than the original poster may think, and probably on the minds of lot s of people who don't get cricket news on espn/local sports news.
It's in the dictionary, what more do you want? My suspicion is that you're just angry because someone used a word you didn't know.
And what's a "native English word" anyway? Would "man" qualify? That's German too. How about "detail"? That's French. "Pajama"? Whoops, Persian.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
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?
At the bottom they had a link to Pigeon Rank which I find very funny. I don't know how recent it is but it's new to me.
Google is great for the occasional joke like this.
The rules of cricket are actually quite simple, and deftly explained here.
The Rules of Cricket as Explained to a foreign visitor
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in.
Each man that's in the side that's in, goes out, and when he's out, he comes in and the next man goes in until he's out.
When they are all out the side that's out comes in and the side that's been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out.
Sometimes you get men still in and not out.
When both sides have been in and out including the not-outs, that's the end of the game.
This description of the game is remarkably accurate.
I can't believe eBay was so high up the list. Seriously, how many people google for eBay? Is eBay.com (or ebay.{your country's domain ending here}) that hard to remember?
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Do people actually use one word searches? Or are these just the most popular searched words? Or does Google aggergate all the different searches into categories? (e.g. "brittney spears CD" and "brittney spears lipsync" ends up as "brittney spears")
What I find interesting is that some people use google to go ebay, cnn, bbc. Many people are using google not as a search engine, but as a quicker way to get to a site than typing www.cnn.com (or even cnn.com). I find it hard to believe that sooo many people don't know the URL for ebay or cnn. Even the BBC has a .com domain!
It might have to do with the fact that many people use google as their home page (or have a google search box in the browser).
http://www.google.com/jobs/britney.html
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
And I think it's wonderful. It helps elevate writing into art instead of mere formulaic transmission of information. And the incredible variety of words is what makes English such a delightfully expressive language. It's a gift to be reveled in, and my hat's off to Google for selecting the perfect word for the occasion.
I don't get the distinction you're trying to draw. Both words came from German. One is used more often than the other. Does that make it more native? What, specifically, is your definition of nativeness in a language where almost all words are borrowed?
I didn't "have" to; I linked to it so that you could see it was there, because you seemed to be having vocabulary problems.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
To see what people are currently searching for live, try Dog Pile Search Spy
Some of the searches can be a little disturbing...
What a frickin time to release such a list when my wife's standing behind me wondering what the hell is keeping me while being devoid of any interest towards what she is saying:
Paris Hilton, Britney, Carmen and Pamela.. Oh Crap!!
I turn around in time to see her look turn in to disgust with the "You and your pervert buddies scored yet again this year!!" before she stomped off in to the kitchen..
Aaargh..time to take care of the History folder..
Rapid Nirvana
Would it surprise you to find that New England has about half the number of internet users as India?
Population of New England: 14,205,480 (2003)
Indian internet users: 18,500,000 (2004)
So, assuming 65-70% of New England population use the internet, New England has roughly 9 million internet users.
And Indian access is growing at a very resonable rate. I see no reason why it won't hit 50,000,000 by 2006.
Add to that the country's obsession with cricket, and it's understandable - imagine the fan bases of football, basketball, baseball and the WWE all following the same team and it will give you an idea of the scale of the following of the the Indian Cricket Team.
cLive ;-)
-- Trinity in high heels carrying a whip: The donimatrix - there is no spoonerism
Why did you have to use a fancy old French word like "nuance", instead of just "meaning", which would have worked in that context?
If you don't understand why they're using it, I don't think you fully appreciate what zeitgeist means.
It is pretty much the only word we have that conveys the notion of "spirit of the times". (It would literally translate as "time ghost".) In some sense, it was the lack of a suitable word in english that resulted in the german word being added to our dictionary.
A "year-end summary" doesn't properly convey the idea that we are seeing a snapshot of the underlying culture and interests of the period.
"Hmmm..I sure have heard a lot about this there Amazon thing. I wonder how to find it online. I know, I'll ask that Google thingamabog."
(Slamming my head against my desk repeatedly)
Wow, your reading comprehension is really bad.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
This is my first time looking at this annual data, and the most striking thing about it is how vanilla it is.
There is nothing interesting going on; it appears most people are depressingly mundane in their interests and tastes. Where are all the 'rugged individualists', the 'rebels without a cause'? As much as we pay lip service to our desire to stand-out, we are strangely sheepish.
I am begining to believe Asimov's 'The Marching Morons' is, in fact nonfiction...
This is why all marketing is incredibly stupid, because it is based on the most common attribute in order to maximize profits.
Conversely, we have the technology today to automate the personalization of products - which, strange as it may seem, would actually produce more profit (consider, not only would we gather all of the vanilla folks, we would also pull in those wanting unique attributes: X + Y > X every time). Yet most, if not all businesses refrain from this approach.
Given that - this data is useless to me, other than to make me look around at my fellow men and women for the tell-tale vacuous stare.
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
If the tone of your origian post wasn't expressing irritation at Google gittin' all fancy-like with them there thirty-cent words, perhaps you would not have been subjected to such a humiliating barrage of people pointing out your ignorance.
For that matter, if (as you now claim) you genuinely were curious about the distiction between "zeitgeist" and "summary," you could have looked it up at dictionary.com or m-w.com yourself, and spared yourself from a brief (but festive) flame-war.
Zeitgeist might not be a popular word in whatever circles you happen to run in, but it is a word that English speakers use a lot, and corporate marketing types (who would be among the most interested in this sort of information) have been using a Hell of a lot, especially in the last decade or so. (One could even say it has entered the national zeitgeist... but that would just be piling on at this point.)
In fact, it would be tough to find an entire issue of Wired magazine which doesn't use the word "zeitgeist" somewhere between the covers.
If you really wanted to insist on a more common word, however, then "fads" might have almost done the trick. Almost.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
More information, fewer words - one of the benefits of an expanded vocabulary. Just ask Homer. ;)
Really? Because I always thought that the Illiad was considered rather verbose.
Oh... Maybe you were talking about a different Homer.
D'oh!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
From google:
Zeitgeist Explained
The term "zeitgeist" comes from the German "Zeit" meaning "time" and "Geist" meaning "spirit". The term is defined in English by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate® Dictionary as "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era." Google believes that this word and its definition appropriate to describe the program it implemented to share global search statistics and trends from the world's most popular search engine.
That's from this page
With pornography and sex related items being some of the most popular queries for search engines, why do they never seem to make it in to Google Zeitgeist?
slashdot!=valid HTML
what?
are you trying to go into the ins and outs of cricekt?
If anyone didn't notice, Linux is number 5 on tech stuff searches. If the same people who search for Britney Spears and Spongebob are searching for Linux, maybe it's making a dent.
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_series
there is simply no mentions of the iraq war and the US elections? looks like something is wrong somewhere as these two were heavy issues this year...
Okay Mods! That was meant to be funny.
Overheard American guy: "The French are so stupid - they don't even have a word for entrepreneur."
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