You can tell it’s December when annual Top 10 lists start appearing left, right and centre — but at least Google’s most popular search results (just issued to the media) have the virtue of being based on millions of searches rather than just some bored hack’s guesswork. Mind you, the actual top searches do tend to suggest that we’re a fairly thick bunch: why would you type Google into Google itself? More interesting from a Lifehacker point of view are the fastest rising terms, which include iPhone, YouTube, Firefox 3 and wiki. Here’s the ten most popular terms overall:
ggw_bach
December 3, 2008 at 7:14 AM
what’s with search #8?
“My” ???
Report PermalinkAngus Kidman
December 3, 2008 at 9:16 AM
I’m guessing it’s maybe attached to other terms (“my Facebook”), but still not much of an advertisement for the collective intelligence, is it?
Report Permalinkclinton
December 3, 2008 at 9:41 AM
alot of people seaching for google? in what?
Report PermalinkDave
December 3, 2008 at 10:17 AM
Source? Nothing showing on Zeitgeist
Report PermalinkAngus Kidman
December 3, 2008 at 11:44 AM
As the post mentions, the list was sent to media this AM — I imagine it’ll show up on Zeitgeist in a day or two.
Report PermalinkMarshall
December 3, 2008 at 11:51 AM
Aren’t these things already part of the zeitgeist? ;)
Report Permalinklocus
December 3, 2008 at 12:55 PM
i forwarded this to a colleague, who reckons the google search is probably from the browsers built in search, where people type google, to bring up the search page..
He’s a thinker he is…
Report PermalinkMacca
December 3, 2008 at 1:17 PM
Quote;
‘why would you type Google into Google itself? ‘
From ‘the I.T. crowd’
Report Permalink“Excuse me, I am head of I.T., I think I know about these things. If you type ‘google’ into Google, you will break the internet.”
Andrew Garrett
December 3, 2008 at 3:15 PM
If you type google into google, you can break the internet.
http://au.youtube.com/watch?v=Fet0SCt7uGg
Report PermalinkKbcool
December 3, 2008 at 3:20 PM
Even Yahoo’s top searches make more sense than this drivel.
http://buzz.yahoo.com/yearinreview2008/
They could have filtered out all the searches for google and youtube at least. It’s quite obvious they filtered out Yahoo and Ninemsn.
Report PermalinkArran
December 3, 2008 at 5:13 PM
Most of those search terms are people being lazy…ok, google mystifies me perhaps people are just really curious about the history of certain billionaires. If you open a browser and your home page is google the cursor is already is the google bar, you can type youtube and hit “I’m feeling lucky” and you go to youtube. type – tab – enter nice and quick.
The old fashioned way is to click on the url bar, maybe press delete to remove the address that’s in there, type http://www.youtube.com then enter.
Report Permalinkclick-keystroke-type enter…the big difference is the click. Using google and I’m feeling lucky you can get to a popular page with no mouse clicks…show me the results of ‘google searches’ and exclude “I’m feeling lucky’s” and I bet it’s very close to yahoo’s results of the top 10.
azfish
December 3, 2008 at 8:08 PM
Wouldn’t it be because people are searching for “Google [product]“? Like I might have heard of “Google Maps”, so that’s what I’d search for. Because Google has so many products, which people would often use Google itself to find, the term “Google” is counted for each of these searches.
Alternatively, could it be that people type “google [search]” into their address bar as though it is a keyword search, but in actual fact it is simply not recognised as a URL, so is parsed to the default websearch engine?
Report Permalinkidodialog
December 3, 2008 at 9:00 PM
Funniest thing I’ve read in ages.
Report PermalinkNo, wait..
Saddest thing I’ve read in ages.
Wait.. this is Australia, why isn’t “My” at No.1?
Hang on “Games”, “Sydney”, “Google”, “My” what sort of searches are these? Even the rest are mad. People really don’t know how to use a browser or the internet.
Get me out of here.
Ben
December 15, 2008 at 11:28 PM
well i know ive searched Google a few times but i only type Google up the top just to get to the site and it automatically goes to Google and searches what ive typed, so im guessing Google is the first thing that we type when we need to search something. and wat the hell is My?
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