YouTube screengrab of Rebecca Black singing 'Friday'
Google has released its 11th annual Zeitgeist data, rounding up the most popular or fastest rising terms searched for on its site, and as usual there are strange quirks in the data for Canadians.
The most searched for people list is lead by Rebecca Black of Friday infamy in Canada and the rest of the world. The rest of the list is familiar, Pippa Middleton ( super popular in Canada according to Yahoo) as well some notable lives (Charlie Sheen, Adele, Casey Anthony) and deaths (Jack Layton, Steve Jobs, Ryan Dunn, Osama bin Laden, Amy Winehouse).
The most searched for images starts boring: Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry... but just when you've been lulled to sleep by a cavalcade of celebrities the number five most popular image search: Flowers. And it's been a steady favourite across 40 weeks of graphically displayed data. The rest of the top 10 are pop culture divas like Gaga and Nicki Minaj, and ends with the non-existent "iphone5." Oops.
In the "what is" category it appears Canadians were trying to figure out some new and old technology as well as some web phenoms, but the number one concern was an age-old question:
- what is love
- what is wikipedia
- what is android
- what is tumblr
- what is 3g
- what is gluten
- what is depression
- what is planking
- what is global warming
- what is dubstep
We get the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, we get Google's mobile operating system Android (millions of "Android" phones have been sold in the last year), we even get photo-blogging service Tumblr and the wireless standard 3G. But how is dubstep – an electronic music style with accompanying awesome dance moves – in the same top-of-mind frame for 40 weeks as such universal anxiety-causers as global warming and depression? Planking, we're not going to address, that was based on a burst of interest after some high profile incidents.
And in case you wondered what was the number one recipe search was, bazinga if you guessed pork tenderloin. This juicy but hard not to dry out cut of meat had more than double the share of searches than any of the next seven on the list: Pumpkin pie, butter chicken, quinoa salad, cake pops, tzatziki, macaroni salad. Are you surprised the salads peaked in the summer and the deserts popped in the fall? Neither are we.
Dig through the whole site here – googlezeitgeist.com – if you see anything amazing tell us about it in the comments below.
Shane Dingman