Phuket Lifestyle: Google’s top 10 searches of 2011

PHUKET: It is that time of year again when people look back at the year that’s been and compile lists.

Google have been doing this for the past 11 years and call their compilation of year’s most popular searches the Year-End Zeitgeist which means “the spirit of the times”.

To compile the 2011 Year-End Zeitgeist, Google will use the aggregation of billions of queries people have typed into the search engine then filter out spam and repeat queries to build lists that rank in order of the largest volume of searches.

Globally the top ten were, at number one, 13-year-old Rebecca Black who made a big splash on the internet with the release of her pop single “Friday” which went viral, receiving over 167 million views on YouTube.

Google’s new social networking site, Google+, came in at a strong second with Ryan Dunn an American reality television personality killed in an alcohol-related car crash at number three.

Casey Anthony, a mother charged with killing her young daughter was number four while the release of Battlefield 3, a first-person shooter video game, came in at number five,

The anticipated release of the iPhone5 (which turned out to be the iPhone 4S) was number six, while British singer Adele was number seven.

At number eight a Japanese script search for TEPCO (owners of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant) were the first non-Latin term to make it to the global fastest-rising list while Apple founder the late Steve Jobs and iPad 2 placed 9th and 10th, respectively.

The list of fastest-falling Google searches search terms whose popularity plummeted in 2011 was topped by Myspace, a social networking pioneer that has been eclipsed by the likes of Facebook and Google+. The fastest-falling list also included Hi5, another social networking site and Baidu, a Chinese search engine.

— Marc Mulloy