14 DAY TRIAL // Google has unveiled its 2011 Zeitgeist, its review of the year that is ending, as seen through the eyes of online search. The fastest rising searches show what were the events that sparked the most interest from people.
The new Zeitgeist site is brimming with info and charts. The fastest rising - Rebeca Black, the fastest falling - MySpace, and plenty of other categories will keep you busy for a while.
The most interesting part are the broken down categories, by country. Google has data for 48 countries this year, so you can check out what your countrymen have been interested in this past year.
"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," Amit Singhla, Google Fellow, wrote.
"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," he explained.
Peaking people's interest around the world this year was Rebecca Black, who's enthusiasm for the weekend certainly struck a lot of chords with a lot of people.
Google's brand new social network, Google+ grabbed a lot of attention, it was the second fastest search on the site. Apple managed to grab three of the top 10 spots in this chart with the iPhone 5, the iPad 2 and, sadly, with Steve Jobs' death.
The fastest falling searches of 2011 are equally interesting, MySpace tops this chart, followed by Hi5 and Mebo. It seems it wasn't a good year to be a social network that wasn't Facebook. As a sidenote, Mebo is a common misspelling of Meebo, which Google now automatically corrects.