Today I delved into the Google Zeitgeist, which is a sort of statistical analysis of search patterns done on google. (Zeitgeist, by the way, comes from the German word . . . well, Zeitgeist and translates roughly as spirit of the times.) The site is loaded with gobs of information. For example, these are the top 10 gaining queries as of last week:
- california recall
- arnold schwarzenegger
- kobe bryant
- shirin ebadi
- rugby world cup
- napster
- red sox
- uma thurman
- n-gage
- christopher columbus
But that just scratches the surface of what information is available. It's fun to delve a little deeper, and I was especially intrigued, and sometimes puzzled, by some of the search terms currently popular in other countries.
In September, the most popular fictional character in Canada was Spongebob Squarepants.
For the Germans, holidays must be extremely important; three of the top ten queries in Germany were halloween, oktoberfest, and weihnachten (Christmas).
In Spain, the third most popular query was smallville.
In Italy, the number one search term was trenitalia. That must be one cool train line.
In both the Netherlands and Australia, Eminem is at number 1.
And in Japan the fifth most popular query was ウエディングドレス (wedding dress), with 地震 (earthquake) in seventh place.
There is also an archive of past statistics, so you can track changes over time.
Another interesting way of getting a glimpse of the current zeitgeist is on Yahoo! News, where you can see which of the current slew of news stories are most viewed, most e-mailed, or most highly rated by readers. You also have the option of viewing the most popular news photos.
Curious about what kind of people still have not switched over to Google? Well these are the sorts of things they search for on Lycos.
Finally, if you want to stay up-to-date on what people are reading, Amazon has a page listing their top 100 sellers of the hour.