News — Google Internet Pool Reports — December 21, 2011 12:21 pm

Google releases annual Zeitgeist report

Posted by Editorial Team

Google released its annual Zeitgeist report, a look at 2011 through the collective eyes of the world on the web, offering a unique perspective on the year’s major events and hottest trends based on searches conducted in the UAE, KSA, Egypt and around the globe.

This year’s fastest rising searches show a sustained interest in local content, with ‘Dubai’, ‘UAE‘, ‘Emirates’ “Etisalat’ and ‘Dubizzle’ all in the top 25 for the UAE. In Egypt, phrases like ‘Jan 25th Revolution’, ‘Tahrir square’ and ‘Mubarak’s trial’ were all predictably in the top ten, while ‘hafiz’ (a Ministry of Labour website), ‘Al Jazeera’ and ‘Al Arabiya’ all ranked quite high in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. These local searches were interspersed with all the usual suspects that pop up around the globe, such as ‘YouTube’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’.

In terms of the fastest rising searches for people in Egypt, those related to the revolution were also near the top, with ‘Mubarak’, ‘Wael Ghonim’, ‘Essam Sharaf’ and ‘Hussein Salem’ all placing high in the ‘people search’ ranking.

“Everyday we get more than one billion searches on Google for information worldwide, and the UAE in particular is the third-fastest growing country in the MENA region in terms of search queries. Today we are very excited to share with internet users here in the the UAE Google Zeitgeist, which reveals the year-end results of the fastest rising search queries they have conducted throughout the year,” said Mohammad Mourad, Google Gulf Regional Manager.

These lists and data visualizations are created using a combination of several tools that give insight into global, regional, and past and present search trends on an aggregated level. Google Insights for Search (http://www.google.com/insights/search), a publicly available tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries, informed many lists and graphs found on this year’s Year-End Zeitgeist page.

Using the Insights for Search page, anyone can compile data on the most common searches, or else determine the relative popularity of certain search words in one country or between different countries. Insights for Search analyzes a portion of worldwide Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. Google Insights for Search can never be used to identify individual users because it relies on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over a period. The patterns observed in the data are only meaningful across large populations of Google search users.

Google Zeitgeist tools rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time. To see the worldwide results, please visit: (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2011/) after December 15th 12:00 GMT.

Fastest rising searches in the UAE:

1. Facebook
2. Cricket live
3. Dubizzle
4. Samsung
5. Al Jazeera
6. Translate
7. Dubai
8. UAE
9. Etisalat
10. Emirates

Egypt’s Fastest Rising Queries

1. Jan 25th revolution
2. Tahrir square
3. Facebook
4. Jokes 2011
5. Al Youm Al Sabaa
6. Mubarak’s trial
7. Twitter
8. Ministry of Finance
9. Google Gravity
10. The Forbidden Love series