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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.

A search engine, is it really the best way to access our favorite sites?

If truth be told, the use of Google “as a starting page for everything” is most evident where societies with lesser developed telecommunications technologies are analyzed. Why is Peru’s third most searched word “peru”? What motive led Uruguayans to look up not only “uruguay” (also in 3^rd place in the popularity rank), but “google” in Google (in 9^th place)? Information provided by Google undoubtedly gives us many clues as to what’s on peoples’ minds at any given time (swine flu, New Moon, the Gosselin family or Lady Gaga), but also how to use new technologies and navigation and search tools on the Internet.

Analysis of this data goes far beyond what these preliminary thoughts attempt to claim, and their study should be serious and in-depth. But it is a worrisome fact that at this point in time, we have many users who still use Google the way they do. This should lead us to reflect on whether user interface browsers are truly oriented towards “real” users (the Google Chrome project would be an approach to this problem), or if the whole of society still needs more time to assimilate online digital life as a tool for knowledge and universal communication.

In any case, at Finday we work to bring the Internet to our users in a more practical and natural way. Clearly, browser bookmarks don’t properly meet the needs of the modern Internet user, who usually accesses the Net from multiple locations and different devices. Having an online profile where we can center all our personal starting points on the Internet is, in this context, a very basic part of the process. But until now, the idea of integrating a social aspect to a search engine had not been seriously considered. Democratizing Internet searches will not only help us find better things in less time, but who knows, it might even contribute to change the basic guidelines that Google Zeitgeist’s data shows in a not so distant future.

Tags: 2009, finday, google, searches, social, twitter, zeitgeist

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 2:08 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.