Zeitgeist of the year 2008

Sarah Heath Palin: she lost election but she won the Google Zeigeist

One year ago, i wrote about Google Zeitgeist of 2007. Now it's time to write about the Zeitgeist of they year 2008.

Zeitgeist is a german word and it could be translated as "spirit of the age" or "spirit of the times", it is best known in relation to Hegel's view of philosophy of history.

From Google Zeitgeist site:
As the year comes to a close, it's time to look at the big events, memorable moments and emerging trends that captivated us in 2008. As it happens, studying the aggregation of the billions of search queries that people type into the Google search box gives us a glimpse into the zeitgeist — the spirit of the times. We've compiled some of the highlights from Google searches around the globe and hope you enjoy looking back as much as we do.

Actually, in US Zeitgeist they are more specific:
"Fastest rising" means we looked at the most popular searches conducted for 11 months of 2008 (we compile this list by early December) and ranked them based on how much their frequency increased compared to 2007.

Fastest Rising (Global)

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

1 Tuenti is a Madrid-based, invite only private social networking website (launched on May 2006) that has been referred to as the "Spanish Facebook". The name Tuenti, pronounced in Spanish, sounds like Twenty in English. Tuenti is targeted at the Spanish audience. The site is currently accessible only to those who have been invited
2 nasza-klasa.pl (Our Class) is a large social networking platform for people in Poland, a social networking site bringing together a school's students and alumni; launched on november 2006, today has 11 million registered people
3 wer kennt wen is a german social networking website created on 2006, today has 4.9 million of users
4 Jonas Brothers are an american boy band active since 2005

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Google.com - Fastest Rising (U.S.)

1. obama
2. facebook
3. att
4. iphone
5. youtube
6. fox news
7. palin
8. beijing 2008
9. david cook
10. surf the channel

5 att should be AT&T: the largest provider of both local and long distance telephone services, DSL Internet access and wireless service in the United States with 71.4 million wireless customers and more than 150 million total customers
6 David Cook (1982) is an American singer-songwriter. On May 21, 2008, he won the seventh season of the reality television show American Idol
7 SurfTheChannel is website for TV fans

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Fastest Rising UK

1. iplayer
2. facebook
3. iphone
4. youtube
5. yahoo mail
6. large hadron collider
7. obama
8. friv
9. jogos
10. wiki

Most Popular UK

1. facebook
2. bbc
3. youtube
4. ebay
5. games
6. news
7. hotmail
8. bebo
9. yahoo
10. jobs

8 friv is Friv.com: a site with 200 flash games online
9 large hadron collider (LHC) is the world's largest particle accelerator

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You can't miss the Techcrunch article about the Google Zeitgeist and you can read the TOP 10 searches for 2008 by Yahoo (but it's so similar to the 2007 list!):

1 Britney Spears
2 WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment)
3 Barack Obama
4 Miley Cyrus
5 RuneScape
6 Jessica Alba
7 Naruto
8 Lindsay Lohan
9 Angelina Jolie
10 American Idol

Where are the techno-enthusiasts who were telling us "Mankind will enter a new era with Internet!" ??