Wednesday, December 20, 2006 1:20 PM
Today's Washington Post contains an article, A Search for Ourselves, that is subtitled, User-Generated Content Dominates Google's 2006 Hot List. The article covers Google release of "an annual 'zeitgeist' of the search terms that gained the most in usage in 2006, giving the world a peek behind its bare-bones home page and a window into the world's mind."
Google breaks out its search terms into categories and by country (see Zeitgeist By Country This Month), which allows it to look beyond all of the "Paris Hilton" searches and also offer a worldview beyond just the United States. What Google found, according to the Post article: "[t]he top search terms were words related to user-generated content, such as blogs, social networking sites and podcasts."
Indeed, the number one search term was "Bebo," which many of us in the USA have never heard of, but which apparently is an online social network already huge in the United Kingdom with a growing audience here in the States. See Bebo.
As a sidenote, another interesting finding of this year's release was that "many people choose to type the name of the Web site into the search box [at Google] rather than type the Web address into the browser." I have no problem believing this, as I have watched for years as lawyers and legal staff fail to grasp the concept of the Address bar in Internet Explorer. They are apparently not alone.
In any case, if you want to find out more about the growth in interest surrounding user-generated content, check out the Post article linked above or take matters into your own hands at 2006 Year End Zeitgeist.