Google Releases Its Annual Zeitgeist Project Listing Year’s Most Popular Searches

Every year Google reveals a list of the most popular searches performed using its search engine. Called Zeitgeist Project 2011, it offers what some refer to as a peak into the national psyche, hence the term Zeitgeist, because it offers a way for social psychologists, politicians, news agencies, and regular people a glimpse at what an awful lot of people thought was important enough to search for.

Unfortunately, this year, just as in other years, the national psyche doesn't appear to run very deep. Also, it seems our national psyche might just be run by young people with an obsession for national spectacle, as only one of the top ten searched topics had much if anything to do with any real issues of social substance.

The top search topic, for those that can't stand the suspense, was "Rebecca Black," which may astound those who have never heard of this young lady. She's a 13 year old singer who came out of nowhere with a viral video catapulting her to stardom following the path of Justin Bieber. Next on the list was "Google+" which probably doesn't surprise anyone seeing as how it's a Google run project. After that comes "Ryan Dunn", the Jackass star who was killed in an car accident, "Casey Anthony" the mother acquitted of killing her daughter, "Battlefield 3" a video game, "iPhone 5", "Adele" another singer who came out of nowhere, stuff about the Fukushima nuclear plant (in Japanese no less), Steve Jobs, and the iPad2.

To keep the project from appearing to be a one-trick-pony, Google also has lists for Fastest Rising and Falling topics, as well as the Fastest Rising topics in Entertainment (because that's clearly what we are most interested in searching for), Consumer Electronics, Food and Drink, Google Maps, People and Google News. Here instead of a simple list, visitors get a month by month map showing what was rising the fastest during that month. As an example, clicking on Fastest Rising general topics, then choosing January, shows that at the beginning of the year last year, a lot of people really wanted to know all of the sudden what was so different about the iPad2, versus the original.

It's not all just fluff of course, the main screen shows counts of people searching the world over. Users that narrow their search by country find deeper stuff, such as the Herman Cain sex scandal, etc.

Clearly reading too much into the results of searchers doesn't say nearly as much about as a people as many would like to pretend; after all, people only run to Google to find out about stuff that is going on in the bigger world, they already know what's going on locally, or the things that are most important to them.