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Zeitgeist 2011: How the world searched
December 15, 2011
This year marks our
11th annual
look back at the searches that compose the year’s Zeitgeist—the spirit of the time. With Zeitgeist, we look at the most popular and the fastest rising terms—the terms with the highest growth in 2011—in many categories across many countries around the world. For our
2011 Zeitgeist site
, we’ve improved the visualizations to make it easy to compare terms across categories, added detailed infographics for an immersive dive into the data and created a video overview of the search terms that captivated the world this year.
What were they? As it turns out, all around the world, we were excited for the weekend. Web celeb
Rebecca Black
was the #1 fastest rising query globally, as fans searched for information about the “Friday” singer. She wasn’t the only songstress to capture international attention this year:
Adele
made the fastest rising lists in over 15 countries spread across five continents, in addition to claiming a spot on our
global list
. Reality star
Ryan Dunn
, defendant
Casey Anthony
and tech luminary
Steve Jobs
also made our list, as people of interest took five of the top 10 spots.
When looking at the data, it is fascinating to see the cultural fads and trends that took over the globe, from cupcakes (making top food lists in over a dozen countries) to the Dukan diet and high-profile weddings, but Google was used for much more than staying up to date on the sisters
Middleton and Kardashian
. From local celebrities in
Finland
to
Singaporeans
looking for news on the revolutions in Egypt and Libya half a world away, people turned to Google to learn more about what was happening on the world stage. It wasn’t just the man-made moments that topped the charts this year, but also the natural disasters that literally shook the world, from
Hurricane Irene
in the U.S. to the earthquakes in
Christchurch
and
Japan
.
Terms related to the Japanese earthquake showed up on lists from almost half of the countries included in the 2011 Zeitgeist, including
Japan
, where 地震 (earthquake) topped the country’s fastest rising list, and our global list, where
東京 電力
(TEPCO, owners of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant), became the first non-Latin term to ever make our global fastest-rising list. In addition to news about what had happened, people around the world also looked for ways to give: In the U.S., the top three searches related to
charitable giving
were about helping Japan.
I love search, and to me, it’s exciting to learn more about people in other countries by looking at what they search for—from the most searched for
Swiss mountain peaks in Switzerland
to
soccer terms in Argentina
and the
stuff of Italian dreams
. As the proud owner of a Miniature Schnauzer, I was pleased to see that dogs always beat cats on lists of popular pets, but was surprised to learn that in Russian the most searched for pet was
pygmy giraffes
(which don’t really exist but are very cute) and in the U.S.,
sugar gliders
made the list.
We hope you enjoy
learning more
about what people around the world and in your country were searching for in 2011.
Posted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow
Labels
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41
acquisition
26
ads
131
Africa
19
Android
58
apps
419
April 1
4
Asia
39
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48
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12
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7
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33
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12
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120
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35
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68
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46
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61
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124
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19
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19
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39
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139
politics
71
privacy
66
recruiting and hiring
32
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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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