Google Zeitgeist Reveals UK Search Habits

Google has published its annual Zeitgeist list, revealing the search terms that Brits have been using most frequently on the popular search engine.

The top search terms in the UK this year were Facebook, BBC, YouTube, Hotmail and eBay, suggesting that many people still prefer to look up their favourite sites on a search engine rather than type in the URL. Oddly Google itself came in sixth place – we can’t explain why that is there at all. [Perhaps everyone is testing that theory that if you type “Google” into Google, the Internet blows up – editor]

Meanwhile, the fastest rising search term in the UK was Chatroulette – the online dating site that pairs random strangers from around the world for webcam-based conversations. Formspring, a social networking questions and answers site, came second, followed by iPad and Justin Bieber.

Politics and gossip

Top of the list of names that were searched was Kristian Digby, an English television presenter best known for To Buy or Not to Buy on BBC One. Digby died unexpectedly in March 2010 – reportedly as a result of some kind of sex game involving a plastic bin liner – causing a surge of searches.

Other names that made it onto the top ten list include Nicki Minaj, Alexander McQueen, Kim Kardashian and Katy Perry [Do any eWEEK readers know who all these people are? – Editor]

The General Election earlier this year gave rise to a burst of interest in politics, with ‘election 2010’, ‘register to vote’ and ‘david cameron’ coming top of the news and current affairs category. It appears not everyone is so high-minded however, as ‘daily mail showbiz’ was the fifth most popular search in this category.

Google’s Zeitgeist list is calculated by looking at the aggregation of the most popular and fast-rising search queries being typed in to the UK search engine. In this respect, it is similar to the Trends list at Twitter, which recently defended its algorithmic policy that apparently has led to the absence from Twitter’s trends of this week’s hottest tech tredn, WikiLeaks.

Google said that around a quarter of the search queries it responds to on a daily basis are new queries.