Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
16 December 2002

Never mind Santa Claus, Google knows who’s naughty or nice… It just published the Google 2002 Year-End Zeitgeist revealing the interests of millions across the Internet as expressed in what they search for. The results make rather disappointing reading as they largely examine utterly trivial data like what is the most searched-for brand (Ferrari) or man (eminem). Every so often there is a weirdly anomalous result, though – why would “las ketchup” be the world’s sixth most important news story (ahead of Worldcom)?

Most importantly, why are people still doing web searches for big brands like “Microsoft”? Haven’t they learned to stick “.com” at the end of the name and type that into their web browsers yet?

1 Comment

  1. 1) make google your default search engine
    2) enable searches from the address bar
    3) type ‘microsoft’ instead of ‘microsoft.com’.

    Tah-dah!

    Comment by Harald — 16 December 2002 @ 3:04 pm

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.