Ever go to a search engine and type a few words to see what pops up on the autocomplete list – just out of curiosity? Well, Google Zeitgeist sort of does that too. And they’re sharing the results…
We studied an aggregation of over one trillion searches (or queries) that people typed into Google Search this year. We used data from multiple sources, including Google Trends and internal data tools. We filtered out spam and repeat queries to build lists that best reflect the spirit of 2012.
Trending
The “trending” queries are the searches that had the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012 as compared to 2011.
Most Searched
The “most searched” queries are the most popular terms for 2012—ranked in order of the queries with the largest volume of searches.
Privacy & Security
All the searches we studied are anonymous. No personal information was used.
The categories include everything from events (Hurricane Sandy, Kate Middleton Pictures Released, Olympics 2012) to Airlines (Southwest, United, American). You can look at longer lists and break them down by country, too.
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