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How we came up with year-end Zeitgeist data
28 décembre 2006
Posted by Artem Boytsov, Software Engineer
The
Zeitgeist
is "the spirit of time." This is why when we come up with the
lists of top searches on Google.com for 2006
, we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period -- the truth is, they don't change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as "ebay", "dictionary", "yellow pages," "games," "maps" -- and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don't think they actually define the Zeitgeist.
Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 -- the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006's most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. ("Bebo", for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our "what is" and "who is" lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.
A final note: there was some confusion over the use of descriptors like "most popular" and "fastest-gaining" in
media reports
about our Zeitgeist. We've edited the
2006 Year-End Zeitgeist
description to be more accurate on this point: "we compared frequent queries this year against 2005 to see what sorts of things were top of mind."
We hope you enjoyed our year-end Zeitgeist as much as we enjoyed working on it!
Libellés
Africa
19
Android
58
April 1
4
Asia
39
Europe
46
Latin America
18
accessibility
41
acquisition
26
ads
131
apps
418
books + book search
48
commerce
12
computing history
7
crisis response
33
culture
12
developers
120
diversity
35
doodles
68
education and research
144
entrepreneurs at Google
14
faster web
16
free expression
61
google.org
73
googleplus
50
googlers and culture
202
green
102
maps and earth
194
mobile
124
online safety
19
open source
19
photos
39
policy and issues
139
politics
71
privacy
66
recruiting and hiring
32
scholarships
31
search
505
search quality
24
search trends
118
security
36
small business
31
user experience and usability
41
youtube and video
140
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