Google released the Google Zeitgeist 2011 today. Google made several lists this year and even broke them down by country. You can play with the interactive lists at googlezeitgeist.com. Those in the picture above are included in the "fastest rising searches" category, including Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, Battlefield 3, iPhone 5, Adele, 東京 電力, Steve Jobs and iPad 2. Google summed up the year also in this video: Here is a partial text based list: Fastest-Rising Toys 1. Lego Alien Conquest 2. Unova Pokedex 3. Fluttershy Fastest-Rising Costu [...]

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It's as you would have expected -- searches for Steve Jobs skyrocketed at Google, after news of his death spread. Oddly, Google Trends -- which shows spiking search queries -- failed to show this activity until hours later. Google, Yahoo Didn't Show Spike Yesterday, I had some people ask me why Steve Jobs wasn't showing on Google Trends. This is how things looked at 7:15pm PT yesterday, about 2 1/2 hours after the news that Steve Jobs had died broke: As you can see, "steve jobs" wasn't in the top trending searches. There was nothing related at all. Going to the full list: You can see t [...]

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Google announced a neat new visual display of Google's search volume by search query language. The tool is named the Google Search Globe. Search Globe plots different colored bars protruding from the globe. Each color represents a different language, and you'd see a nice diverse set of colors (i.e. languages) over places like Europe and parts of Asia. Here is a video of how it works: [youtube width="600" height="480"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpOlpZBZU-A[/youtube] The Google Data Arts Team put this together to help Internet accessibility throughout the world by geographic ar [...]

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With much of the world's focus on the tragic earthquake in Japan, Internet security watchers are warning about dangerous web pages showing up in some quake-related search results. Trend Micro reported earlier this morning that malware sites had started targeting search terms shortly after the quake hit. As shown in the image above, Trend Micro found several sites offering fake anti-virus software in the search results for the term, "most recent earthquake in Japan." Thanks to Trend Micro's post and related coverage, the first page of Google's results for that phrase now includes several [...]

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Search activity on Bing didn't help predict the Grammy winners this year; Lady Gaga was the subject of about a zillion more searches than Album of the Year winner, The Arcade Fire. Klout scores also couldn't predict the Grammy Award winners. In fact, social media as a whole failed to tell us who the winners would be in advance. But despite all that, Google is asking if search trends can predict the Oscar winners, and it's created a mini-site called Oscar Search Trends to let us see who's winning the search activity race. As of this moment, Black Swan would be the favorite for Best Pi [...]

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