Thursday 11 December 2008

Absentem Laedit Cum Ebrio Qui Litigat


Good day chums, what's the good word? Whilst sneakily flicking between my work and this delightful christmas gift whenever I hear footsteps behind me, I discovered that Google has released it's end of year search-stats breakdown, the pointlessly-named Zeitgeist.

Zeitgeist, as I'm sure you're all aware, is the German word for Google, as well as being a 4th Century Princess of Estonia. Having been wed to Zeitgeist, I'm somewhat of an expert, so let us commence the debrief.

UNITED KINGDOM

Fastest Rising Searches

  1. iplayer

  2. facebook

  3. iphone

  4. youtube

  5. yahoo mail

  6. large hadron collider

  7. obama

  8. friv

  9. cam4

  10. jogos

Ignoring the madness of facebook and youtube being top searches, they are nothing compared to numbers 8,9 and 10. Let's start with 'friv'. Friv. I don't even know what to say. It's a website of flash games, and a truly atrocious one at that. It's one of those sites which has an empty frontpage where you have to "click on the logo to enter". The most embarrassing thing about friv, however, is that it's not even on the front page of results for its own site. Typing friv into google gives you a list of referrals to friv from stumbleupon, digg and so forth. Why do so many people search for this? It's baffling, especially when you consider that using google to find friv forces you to clickthrough one of these referral websites to get to it, when the actual url of the website is http://www.friv.com/.

Number 9 is cam4. I have to admit I had no idea what this referred to, and had to google it myself. I was expecting some sort of flash-based internet phenomenon that I'd missed out on , but it's actually just a sleazy porno webcam site. Move along.

The most bizarre entry in today's list, however, is number 10. Jogos. Once again, I thought it to be some particular website of which I was currently unaware, presumably something flash-based. Actually, it's just the spanish word for 'games'. The english 'games' is number 5 on the years most popular, which leads me to believe that there has been a steady yet massive increase in the amount of Spanish in the UK over the course of the year. How else could you possibly explain the word "jogos" being the 10th fastest rising search?

Interesting to note are the activities of some other countries. While the youtube brain-melt appears to be a worldwide phenomenon, facebook seems less popular. The poles like to search only for polish websites, with this years favourite being Nasza Klasa, which I'd take a guess at being "no clothes" although I couldn't be sure, and was scared to click through to it as I'm at work. The Danes like to search for the word "af", which either means that they don't really understand how to use a keyboard or they have a very efficient language. Australia's 2nd most popular search term this year was "Sydney". Perhaps everyone is Australia is watching Alias. Either that or they need to use the internet to find out about one of their own largest cities. And finally Argentina, whoze citizens are so addicted to games that their top 2 searches for this year are "Juegos juegos" and, coming in 2nd, merely 'Juegos'. Utterly, utterly incomprehensible.

regards regards

1 comment:

  1. i played that game in the 2nd picture itscalled dont wake her u hav 2 take her clothes of n fingerher witout waking her up its gd

    ReplyDelete