Slashdot Mirror
Google Zeitgeist '05
Garett Rogers writes "Google has just released their Google Zeitgeist 2005. From the site: 'It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires. Considering all that has occurred in 2005, we thought it would be interesting to study just a few of the significant events, and names that make this a memorable year. (We'll leave it to the historians to determine which ones are lasting and which ephemeral.) We hope you enjoy this selective view of our collective year.'"
A little incident at the Super Bowl maybe?
That's the top Google news search, not the top search overall. But really, the Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction was in 2004...
Have you read my blog lately?
http://www.google.com/search?q=Orkut
http://www.google.com/search?q=Ares
http://www.google.com/search?q=Baidu
And for good measure:
http://www.google.com/search?q=zeitgeist
Answer.com - The general moral, intellectual, and cultural climate of an era; Zeitgeist is German for "time-spirit."
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Is it a mistake in the legend, or is there some other force at work?
Look at the StarWars Movie vs DVD search. The DVD peakes when the movie is released and vice-versa.
Now look at Harry Potter right after it. The peaks coincide with their respective releases.
I'm guessing the chart is just messed...which is really too bad, because I thought the reversal was more interesting.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
Simple: it takes little effort to type "cnn.com" and get straight to the news whereas you have to go to "news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/default.stm" to access BBC American news (the main BBC website requires some surfing to get here). Although I read CNN far more frequently than the BBC, I have to use Google to access the BBC American news, but I never do for CNN.
Orkut's very popular in Brazil. It started when the Brazilian membership numbers quickly took off during the early days of Orkut. Now Brasilieros are the dominant present on that website. Last time I checked a few weeks ago, Brazilians comprised about 3/4 of orkut's membership. The end result for you is that if you get an Orkut account, it's likely you'll be inundated with friend-requests from Brazilian twenty-somethings. If you're looking to practice conversational Portuguese, orkut.com's the place.
If you are really interested in more information, sign up for an Adsense advertisers account (free), which will give you unlimited statistics on any particular search term.
After all you need to know what sorts of traffic levels which keywords will generate.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
For example, the world affairs section had ALT tags saying "Star Wars" and "Harry Potter".
Lots of pretty graphics maybe, but it's nothing fantastic -- the stylesheet specifies the font size in terms of pixels, but then tags (come on people, it's not 1995!) are used to specific a relative size, so Firefox ends up rendering the text unbearably small on my system. The layout is also based on a fixed pixel width and doesn't work with your window less than ~1000 pixels.