Don't blame the messenger.
To my mind, it's becoming more and more difficult to take much of an interest in Google
Zeitgeist, though that doesn't necessarily mean that Google Zeitgeist is to blame.
Of course it gets boring if all you've got to report is that the same internet
searches are being conducted day after day, year after year. Yahoo! Buzz seems
to have solved this problem of diminishing interest, the result of the same material
being recycled over and over, by writing about it in an enjoyable, off-the-cuff,
manner, thus camouflaging the fact that basically there's really nothing new there.
After all, though for any given week it may happen that Janet Jackson replaces
Pamela Anderson as the most popular search term, we're essentially dealing with
a rotation between known quantities that are pretty much the same anyway. If you're
looking for substance, neither Zeitgeist, nor Buzz are logical places to look.
Yahoo! Buzz gives us an overall category, and then categories for Actors, Movies,
Music, and Video Games. There isn't even a News category, let alone something
like Interesting Scientific Discoveries, or even Wars Being Waged. The sub-categories
in Google Zeitgeist are only slightly better - News, for instance, is one of them,
as is Web 2.0. (In the report on image searches, we can find a category for "Modern
Art", the five top searches of which, for July 2006, were: tattoo, graffiti,
piercing, logos, and fashion, which I suppose raises some interesting questions
about just what they mean by "Modern Art", but that's a wholly different
issue.) If the Lycos Top 50 holds any advantage over these others, it's would
probably be in the fact that it lists fifty sites. After all, in that way even
a significant world event or two has a chance of sneaking into the list. That,
however, doesn't seem to have happened over the last couple of months, and perhaps
even years. It would appear that if and when people conduct
internet searches, it's for popular culture items. On the positive side, Google
seems to have understood that a weekly report on this stuff is more than sufficient.
Yahoo! continues to serve it up daily.
Go to: Stats of a different sort, or
Go to: Still
running it up the flagpole