Chatroulette and the iPad Top Google's Zeitgeist 2010

Google has released its Zeitgeist 2010 showing the biggest trends of the year in search. The most popular searches and the ones that people forgot about the fastest as well as dedicated categories like the World Cup and the Oil Spill are all analyzed.

"In the search team we talk a lot about that people are always looking for new things with Google. In fact, about 20% of our queries are new each day. As it gets to be the end of the year, it’s a great time to look at what searches we all have in common," Johanna Wright, Director of Product Management for Search at Google, wrote.

"In the 2010 Google Zeitgeist, we’ve gathered the most popular and fastest rising queries from the year to capture the joys, sorrows and curiosity that many of us felt—capturing the spirit of 2010," she said.

The top searches of the year are quite interesting, but they're not exactly surprising. After all, they wouldn't be in the top if they weren't already popular.

The fastest growing search for 2010, worldwide, according to Google is "chatroulette," the random video chat site that took the world by storm early in the year. While the site has died off in popularity since, it was enough to propel it to the top of the chart for the year.

The second fastest rising term was Apple's incredibly popular iPad which sold in record numbers. Apple's tablet set off a wave of imitators yet the device remained the most popular in its category by far.

You can check out the data for the globe as well as in several countries. For this year, Google introduced a very snazzy HTML5 visualization tool to showcase the queries and the trends. The tool makes ample use of the canvas element and the animations are smooth, fast and quite nice looking.