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Google Zeitgeist 2012 Captures The World's Most Searched Topics

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News Posted: Wed, Dec 12 2012 3:22 PM
“Zeitgeist” is a word that should be in everyone’s vocabulary. Roughly meaning “spirit of the times”, the term sums up so many things about a culture at a given point in history.

Google has a Zeitgeist 2012 website that shows the world’s most searched topics from this past year, broken down by subject, type of search, and country. The site’s description on the page is short and sweet and reads in full: “2012 was a year of big moments, from global games to historical elections and everything in between. With this site, we've analyzed over one trillion queries to showcase what the world searched for. ”

Google Zeitgeist 2012

What the site truly offers is a map of the world, over time, within the context of who was searching for what and when. In some cases, there are trends as banal as Carly Rae Jepsen (no offense, Carly Rae), but then you can also see how many people were engaged with the search for the Higgs Boson particle or the SOPA/PIPA battle or Oscar Pistorius’ historic Olympic run. You can spend hours lost in the interactive maps, ruminating on what’s happened in the last year.

Because it’s (almost) the end of 2012, Google saw fit to put together a video to remind everyone of the year that was:

If this doesn’t bring a tear to your eye and/or give you goosebumps, you’re probably not human.
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Dorkstar replied on Wed, Dec 12 2012 5:35 PM

It's so cool to see today's time capsule placed somewhere where everyone across the globe can enjoy it.  I remember as kids placing time capsules under new buildings at school, or even just random spot in the dirt just for fun.  

  Just think, when the current generation of kids have kids, they'll be able to show them exactly what the world was like when they were growing up.  It's incredible.

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OSunday replied on Wed, Dec 12 2012 7:20 PM

I saw an article on Yahoo! News earlier that iPhone and Kim Kardashian were some of the top searched phrases online... lol, oh how humanity is progressing

A Digital Time capsule like this really is interesting though, although I feel like it will be even more interesting in the future when we can look back and think "iPhone and Kim Kardashian where what we searched for the most, what the hell?"

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Dorkstar replied on Thu, Dec 13 2012 11:25 AM

Surprisingly, I don't recall seeing the iphone or Kim Kardashian in that video.

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