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."

Comments

Britney

[daniil]

When will it ever end?

Re:Britney

[RespekMyAthorati]

We should be glad that a fellow geek is so popular: http://britneyspears.ac/lasers.htm/.

All I want for Christmas

[Anonymous Coward]

Is my browser stats.

(No, I don't want stats from some other site. I want them from the Zeitgeist!)

Moderate Safesearch on or off, you think?

[iopha]

Actually, the top four queries were all women: Spears, Hilton, Aguilera, Anderson. I think they image search results might be skewing the data. :D

SCO

[basic0]

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 real top 10

[oexeo]

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

Re:The real top 10

[flatface]

9. harry potter nude

*runs*

Re:The real top 10

[insomnyuk]

Actually, it probably looks more like this:

1. brittnay speers nakkid
2. pearis hillton sex
3. crisstina agweelaira boobie


and so on...

Oh please, no, no no....

[Prince Vegeta SSJ4]

Everyone neither should be or even need be, an intellectual or nerd or scholar or whatever. We need all types of people in this world. But it is kind of scary that the most popular topics on the most popular information 'getter' are:

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.

• 1. britney spears
• 2. paris hilton
• 3. christina aguilera
• 4. pamela anderson
• 5. chat
• 6. games
• 7. carmen electra
• 8. orlando bloom
• 9. harry potter
• 10. mp3

Re:Oh please, no, no no....

[MrHanky]

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.

Re:Oh please, no, no no....

[Anne_Nonymous]

Top 10 Searches by the /. Cognoscente

1. network propagation theory
2. themes in byzantine art
3. rna transcription chemistry
4. bletchley park
5. kafkan high modernism
6. plank's constant
7. differential analysis on manifolds with corners
8. kurosawa and the japanese literary tradition
9. hyaluronic acid stabilizers
10. britney spears

Disappointment again.

[caluml]

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...?

Browser information

[jez9999]

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.

Re:Browser information

[fred_sanford]

They used to report on those statistics but stopped after the news sites started quoting them as official sources.

Something kind of scary

[SuperKendall]

The #2 item on local health searches is "hospital". You can just picture millions of people turning to Google before thinking of dialing 911!!

please explain?

[vida]

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?

Re:please explain?

[caerwyn]

google.com queries at the top are separated from the news.google.com queries (next section down), and the results for the two are different.

Re:cricket?

[vluther]

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 :/

Predictions for 2005?

[bigberk]

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.

Re:Not many women use Google

[jxyama]

>Carmen Electra, and I don't even know what she did this year that would draw so many searches

do you really have to ask? (NSFW)

key word searches.

[westlake]

Geez, everything is entertainment related, with almost no educational value

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?

Re:cricket?

[spisska]

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.

Oh Crap!!

[cOdEgUru]

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..