Garrett Rogers, over at ZDNet has an interesting post about Google Zeitgeist 2005.

It is an end of year report from Google on popular search terms for the year.

Google's year-end report is a very weak and skimpy report, and tells us nothing much. And nothing much that we didn't know already, or could have guessed.

For example, under natural disasters, the tsunami and earthquakes and hurricanes featured in a lot of searches. Wow.

Under movies, the release of the DVD of Star Wars was not as highly trafficked a search term as the release of the movie. Wow.

The release of the Harry Potter book drew as many searches as the release of this year's Harry Potter movie. Wow.

However, Brad Pitt got a lot more action than Jolie or Jen. Well, we knew that.

All in all, Google kept the good stuff to itself: all the billions of queries, the time of them, which region, even which person (name withheld, of course.) That is a database I'd like to mine.

Also, it is a misuse of the term zeitgeist. Here is the definition from Google:

zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

Zeitgeist is a shifting "feel" of a society, its mood, its psychology, its fickleness; and that can change in a heartbeat. It is not something tangible like a search term. And it is always country/society/region/company specific.



A list of popular search terms is just that: a list of popular search terms. It says nothing about the zeitgeist of our societies.

If Google wants to "re-brand" the term zeitgeist, then we need something else. How about "kultura?"

I've used the term before, in the context of how quickly (or slowly) ideas and culture spread across the planet. It seems to take about 6 months to travel from Silicon Valley to the East coast of the US, and another 6 months to travel to London/Europe.

I call this effect the Foremski's universal constant of kultura--for which there is no polite acronym :-)