At the end of every year, Google releases the list ( and video ) of the most searched items on the Internet as well as reports on general trends and their rises and falls over the last 12 months. Every year I love to take a look at these just to gauge where we as the human race stand in our interests and what it is that really captures the attention of the global community. But before I delve into these trends it should be mentioned of the sheer scale of the data compiled, Google states that the number of search queries used are in the billions, and I guess this isn't that difficult to believe, with the average number of page views of google.com being 1.7 Billion, every single day, equating to 87.8 Billion searches and a staggering 600 Petabytes of data processed every month. To put this into perspective 600 Petabytes is 614,400 Terabytes !
People were left shocked when they watched 'The Social Network' and discovered that facebook was worth 25 billion dollars which has since risen to 60 billion dollars. But again to place some perspective Google towers over this, being worth 111 billion at last evaluation, controlling a crazy 85% of the global search market, only being this small due to one seventh of the globe (China) being unable to access its full services. So when I discovered that all this crazy amount of money, time, data and down right awesomeness amounted to Rebecca Black being the number one searched person on the Internet, to say I was disappointed in humanity would be an understatement.
But to put aside too many personal biases it was still an interesting read. The website you will need if you are wanting a more comprehensive look at the results is 'Google Zeitgeist' but for everyone else who don't want or need the graphs, here is a quick summary of what humans wanted information about in this last year.
The top 10 fastest growth list consisted of two separate apple products, (ipad 2 and iphone 5), Rebecca Black, Google Plus, Battlefield 3, Casey Anthony, Adele, Ryan Dunn, The Fukishima Power Plant Meltdown and of course Steve Jobs. On the other hand, the fastest fall list had things such as Myspace, Mebo,Hotmail, Hi5 and Delta Airways. I was quite happy to find that in the top 10 searched news events, a bunch of results consisted of actual news Such as Fukushima, Libya and the death of Gadafi. Also Battlefield 3 made it on the news list with Modern Warfare 3 nowhere to be seen ( :D ).
And if it feels like there is something missing, Charlie Sheen does make it on the list under most searched people on the web, a section that also included Pippa and Kate Middleton, Steve Jobs and of course Osama Bin Laden. Apart from these, there wasn't a heap more interesting stuff. The Amazon Kindle Fire was the most searched consumer electronic, Wendy's the most searched food and a random University in Tennessee was the most searched place.
This may seem silly, but these statistics are a snapshot of what we were in the year 2011, what events mattered to us and who we cared about. As much as we individually define these statistics they in turn define who we are as a collective people. This isn't to say this is a bad thing, but it is definitely worth thinking about when a teenage singer and various electronics can be more important, than events like the London Riots, Occupy Wall St and Egyptian revolution. 2011 was a year of people for change showing that when people work together they can bring revolution to the world.
There is certainly a whole lot more in depth information on the site, but the above is a general summary. For me it is interesting to try and discover what this actually means about society, do we not really care about anything other than Rebecca Black, or do we just not need to go online to find out information about more important things? What are your thoughts? Do these stats surprise you? And what are you going to do to evoke change in your world in 2012?
Read more by Brayden
Read more by Brayden
