In a nutshell, each year Google will collate all the search data and produce Top 10 lists for things like Most Popular Searches and Fastest Rising Searches. There is an obvious bias towards the U.S. in many of these but they do also produce localised Top 10s for countries around the world.
If you select United Kingdom from the list of countries here, you’ll see the top searches on Google.co.uk.
What was interesting for me was to compare it to the Zeitgeist from a few years back. Take a look at the difference between the searches in 2002 and those in 2008.
What a difference six years makes.
Providing these two lists are directly comparable (sourced both from Google, but the UK list was found here), there are some interesting observations to make.
For a start the internet and it’s use is wildly different between the two years. Back in 2002, the number of people online in the UK would have been significantly smaller. The use of broadband technology considerably less too.
Looking at the list I would suggest that the way we use the internet was different too. It would appear a much more ‘one-way’ activity – to look up news on the BBC, book flights on the new cheap budget airlines (easyJet and Ryanair) and find out the latest celebrity gossip (with Kylie Minogue and Britney Spears it may have been more about the image search 
).
Jump forward 6 years and the technology has moved on quickly. More people are online and the take up of broadband internet access has jumped dramtically.
Whilst we’re probably still interested in our celebrities (though it’s probably more Cheryl Cole than Kylie or Britney nowadays), there has been a significant move towards interaction and communication with the web and those using it.
Pretty much every top search term in 2008 involved user generated content – the obvious ones being the social networking sites, Facebook, Youtube and Bebo – but also increasingly the news websites, including the BBC. Where once these sites simply provided the news they now accept comments from users, as well video clips from those that witnessed the newsworthy event.
Three other observations:
- the inclusion of Jobs into the Top 10 is a reflection of the current economic downturn and the inevitable redundancies. In addition, some of the uplify can be attributed to the increased awareness of the internet as a job hunting tool. High profile TV campaigns, such as the one run by Jobsite, are drawing jobseekers away from the traditional methods, as they begin to appreciate the benefits of moving to the online approach.
- 7/10 search results in 2008 are navigational searches (typed with the intention of going to a specific site), compared to 4 in 2002. Could this be the effect of the high brand awareness of these now established online brands? Interesting, the BBC is the only one to make the list on both occasions.
- Amusingly, the 9th most popular term on Google was ‘Yahoo’. Why is it that people use a search engine to find another search engine? I think that says a lot about Google’s dominance in the market and it’s position as the ‘starting place on the internet’.
It will be interesting to see how the list looks in 2009 – what, or specifically who, will we be searching for this year?
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Written by Gary Robinson
Topics: Natural Search Marketing, Search Engine Marketing