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Social Networks Lead Zeitgeist

December 1, 2009 on 7:31 pm | In IdBlog, Spin | Add a Comment

Google released its annual tally of search terms for 2009 yesterday. Although “michael jackson” was the fastest rising global search term on the Google Zeitgeist list, it’s more telling that the other top five terms were all social networks. Slots two through five were occupied by “facebook”, “tuenti”, “twitter” and “sanalika”. Tuenti is a Spanish version of Facebook and Sanalika is a Turkish virtual world similar to Second Life.

Under the category Around the Home, Google listed the top How-To queries. These requests for instruction don’t change much from year to year, so it was no surprise that “how-to kiss” topped the list again this year. Here’s the whole list:

1. how to kiss
2. how to draw
3. how to knit
4. how to crochet
5. how to flirt
6. how to meditate
7. how to hack
8. how to sing
9. how to dance
10. how to fight

Google Trends provides more information about the popularity of this query over time. Apparently, curiosity about the osculatory arts remained constant until the middle of 2008 when “how to kiss” queries took off, as the chart below shows. Is there a correlation between recession and kissing? Well, they say the best things in life are free.