Hang your head, America – Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist has arrived, and we’re a nation obsessed with small plush toys and undressed and/or smashed celebrities.
It’s not all bad, actually – the iPhone was the fastest-rising term in both the U.S. and the world. Number two in the U.S. brought us to Webkinz, though, and number three was TMZ.
Then we came back to rather neutral terms; Transformers placed fourth, and Google’s own property, YouTube, ranked fifth. Club Penguin marked a return to kiddies’ interests at number six, and MySpace – somewhat surprisingly – wound up at number seven. Heroes – that NBC show of uneven quality – came in eighth.
Facebook was ninth, and we must observe that it’s odd to see this social network come under MySpace. Still, moving on to the last place on America’s list, we find Anna Nicole Smith.
The global fastest-rising list lacked her name, TMZ, MySpace, Transformers, and Heroes. But if you mentally move Facebook up, and toss in Badoo, DailyMotion, and eBuddy, the U.S. top ten will give you a pretty good idea of what’s going on globally.
As for those things that fell out of favor (or at least frequent searches): soccer suffered a blow as both the World Cup and FIFA showed up on the fastest-falling list. Mozart somehow became less common, and so did Mexican soap opera Rebelde and the Kazaa file-sharing software.
There you have it, then: the 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist. Uninspiring though it may be, we’ve at least been doing better in the recent past – Radiohead, Pavarotti, and the Red Sox all scored among the fastest gainers in the fourth quarter.
