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Zeitgeist U.S. overview.

There’s no doubt that everything that’s “social” is hip on the Internet. At least that’s what the Google Zeitgeist 2009 study has shown.  This study captures the fastest rising (or falling) queries for each quarter of the year, queries which show the most popular searches on Google in the U.S. in 2009.

According to this data, Twitter and Michael Jackson were the leading searches on Google, holding the top two positions in the Fastest Rising category, coming closely behind in third, was of course, Facebook. The second quarter of 2009 had a sharp peak with the breakout of swine flu cases, making swine flu the most searched query in the Google News ranking. The rest of the queries in this category are mostly comprised of references to reality television, something that has inevitably become an integral part of television and American culture. Searches of singing sensations like Britain’s Got Talent’s Susan Boyle or American Idol’s Adam Lambert, in second and fourth place respectively, show that Americans still can’t get enough of these so-called “rise to fame” stories that come from reality talent searches.

With data like this, obviously our interest isn’t so much on knowing what words are the most searched ones, but to analyze why they are the most popular. It’s striking to know that, at a point in time where browsers themselves self-complete the URLs typed in, taking user navigation history and the integration of practical functions such as bookmarks into account, people readily continue to use Google to target sites which they probably visit on a day-to-day basis, like Facebook. (more…)