Bizarre News

I know what you googled last summer!

Thursday, 11th December 2008

Written by Francesca Cookney

It might have been Facebook… or maybe iPlayer… although in truth it was probably Sarah Palin. Google this week published its end-of-the-year search statistics, or ‘Zeitgeist’, which chart the most popular keywords among billions of Google searches. It revealed not only that Brits’ most popular search of 2007 was for Facebook, but that globally the most searched for phrase was ‘Sarah Palin’.

Even Obama came in behind his Republican rival, being the sixth fastest rising global search trend, trailing after Heath Ledger and the Beijing Olympics. And in the UK the American president-elect was beaten by both YouTube and the Large Hadron Collider.

”Social networks compromised four out of the top ten global fastest-rising queries while the US election held everyone's interest around the globe,” said Google vice-president, Marissa Mayer. As well as Facebook, Hotmail, Bebo, and Yahoo Mail all made it into the top ten.

The economic crisis has obviously been worrying a lot of people, with the terms 'money saving expert' and 'hot UK deals' both getting into the top ten finance-related searches while people’s appetites apparently turned to cupcakes, meatballs, lemon posset and pork belly.

But what does it all mean? Well, it seems we are not as different as we think, says Mayer. People all over the world showed that socialising and politics are at the top of the online priorities while searches for ‘games’, ‘Friv’, and Portugese site ‘Jogos’ shows that despite the economic downturn, Googlers just want to have fun.