Google’s Year-End Zeitgeist Confirms Our Suspicions: Sudoku is Over

Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist offers a narrow but telling window into what topics, stories, and searches topped their charts this past year, from Anna Nicole Smith to Club Penguin. Google came up with their list after studying “the aggregation of billions of search queries people conducted on Google” -  without any of the individual searcher’s information available to them, they assure us. Some discoveries:

• ‘iPhone’ proved the fastest rising search term both globally and in the U.S., while ‘Mozart’, ‘kazaa’, and ‘sudoku’ were among the top 10 fastest falling items in 2007
• In terms of hits from the 3rd quarter of the year: ‘Tour de France’ < ‘Hurricane Dean’ < ‘Vanessa Hudgens’ (a quick eyeballing of the graph suggests that there were nearly four times as many searches for the pop starlet than the international sports event or the natural disaster)
• As the 9th fastest falling search item, ‘Shakira’ may have already hit her peak.

Google’s 2007 Year-End Zeitgeist