The end of the year can mean a lot of different things: an opportunity to start over again, an excuse to get black-out drunk, a time to be grateful for what the year has brought. For many companies, though, it’s a time of number-crunching, data gathering, and final tabulations. This certainly applies to the search engines, who’s final search figures for 2010 are now in.
As reported by The Independent, all the major companies have now released their reports. Google has their Zeitgeist while Yahoo has its Year in Review, and the social networks have their releases as well (Facebook’s “Top Status Trends” and Twitter’s most popular tweets).
The top searches are varied dependent on the search site used, but the heat map still shows us the general topics of greatest interest. The BP oil spill claimed the top spot for Yahoo and had several related terms for Google; the World Cup saw immense popularity on both search engines; the iPad and iPhone 4 were the most commonly searched tech items; and Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber topped the charts for entertainment. Other search trends, including how to guides (like the amusingly popular “how to kiss” search on Yahoo), continue to teach us how the searchers of 2010 think about the web.
These reports are also starting to take a deeper look at the trends on mobile devices, since these results come from a different sort of user who’s manipulating the same functionality for a very different purpose. Top mobile searches included many figures in entertainment as well as sports.
There’s plenty more great data to look at, all separated into appropriate search categories. You can take a look at Google’s Zeitgeist for 2010 here and Yahoo’s Year in Review here.
