As ranked by Google itself by how popular the announcements proved

Jan 3, 2012 18:41 GMT  ·  By

With the year coming to an end, everyone is looking back and summing up 2011. Google looked at its own backyard to see what the most popular subjects of the year on its official blog were.

The major redesign and the launch of Google+ are among the most read items, but there are a few surprises in there as well.

"On the blog this year, we published 471 posts (including this one)—17 more than 2010. Those posts were read by nearly 20 million people; we had 19,905,679 unique visitors between January 1 and December 31," Google wrote.

"We find a few themes in the most popular posts: Google+ was a favorite topic, as well as greater focus and simplicity across Google, and search quality," it said.

The most read Google post of the year wasn't even about Google, it was a short post remembering the 9/11 tragedy. More than 1.7 million people read the post, by far the most popular of the year.

The fact that it was linked to from the Google homepage, which is the most visited page on the web, helped, a lot apparently.

But the announcement of Google+ needed no help, a Facebook competitor from Google is big news any way you look at it. Over 900,000 people were interested in the subject and read the announcement.

The more interesting entries follow, the Bing 'stealing' Google search results controversy of last winter was enough to generate 538,000 unique pageviews.

Google's announcement of its intention of buying Motorola got quite a lot of attention as well, 431,000 people were interested in seeing what Google's plans were for the phone maker.

Other popular topics for the year were the massive Google redesign, which is still underway, the launch of Google+ games and even the launch of the two-step authentication process.