Google’s Zeitgeist takes a look the year in review, but how that year happened on the Internet. Accompanying a bunch of interesting stats regarding this year’s Internet, is a classy video Google put together for folks who don’t like numbers, but like montages set to emotional music.
The Zeitgeist provides an interesting look at 2011’s Internet, and yes, Rebecca Black was the top hot topic, over Steve Jobs’ death, over the Casey Anthony trial, over the iPhone 5’s lack of existence, and over Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which didn’t even make the list even though it couldn’t stop breaking sales records, including breaking Avatar‘s box office record — you know, the movie that broke Titanic’s record. Yep, Rebecca Black is what you cared about, Internet, and I couldn’t agree more. Really, she’s great.
Don’t worry though, the above graphic of rankings, taken from the Zeitgeist page, is measuring how viral a topic was, rather than, say, level of importance, using “fastest-rising global queries” as the metric. This would explain why you’d find Rebecca Black at the top, or why you’ll see Battlefield 3, rather than Call of Duty, making the list, in that people already knew to go buy CoD, so they didn’t really need to search about it. Check out Google’s classy video below:
If you’re into fun stats, the 2011 Zeitgeist page as a bunch of them, and you can compare and contrast how much more the Internet cared about Rebecca Black’s rise to prominence over the death of Steve Jobs. The page also has oodles of Top 10 lists, which track things like the fastest rising consumer electronics or sports. On top of that, you can go check out every Zeitgeist from 2001 and on, which should be pretty fun; remember Shakira and The Matrix? Because 2003 certainly did.
(via Google Zeitgeist)
