Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 2. Glean a Snapshot of Google in Time

Google Zeitgeist provides a weekly, monthly,
and yearly overview of what the Web was interested in .

Turning to Google itself for a definition of
zeitgeist ,
(define:zeitgeist), there's
consensus that it refers to "the spirit of the
times." And Google Zeitgeist (http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeistl)
is just that: a mirror that the Web (according to Google) holds up to
us, providing a snapshot of the week, month, or year that
was. A typical weekly Google Zeitgeist (Figure 1-8)
lists the top 10 gaining and declining queries and some hand-picked
statistics (e.g., top Google News queries, popular sequels), fun
facts (e.g., Tour de France versus Wimbledon), aggregate information
gleaned about Googlers (e.g., operating systems, web browsers,
languages), and any other trends that the Zeitgeist crew cares to
delve into.

It takes only a few moments of visiting Google Zeitgeist before
you're itching to go back a little further in time:
the week your second child was born, the month of the Olympics, the
year you graduated from high school. Click the
"Archived information available
here" link to browse the Google Zeitgeist Archive
(Figure 1-9) of updates for every week, month, and
year since January 2001.

Weekly Zeitgeist updates actually started in June 2001 at the same time the monthlies switched from PDF to HTML format.

The monthlies and year-ends provide more detail with trend graphs and
also further break down searching by country, from Korea to Canada
and points in between.

While Google Zeitgeist's statistics
aren't earth shattering (e.g.,
"Searches for
`iraq' more than doubled on March
19, the date that Operation Iraqi Freedom
began"imagine that!), it does provide you a
snapshot of what the world in aggregate (55 billion searches in 2003)
found interesting enough to look up.

1.14.1. See Also

If Google Zeitgeist piques your interest, you might also try the
Yahoo! Buzz Index (http://buzz.yahoo.com), a similar collection
of statistics around popular Yahoo! Searches: the
day's top movers (overall and by various Yahoo!
categories), most viewed and emailed Yahoo! news items, and a market
trend-like chart (click the "View Complete
Chart..." link associated with any of the buzz
listings on the front page) of leaders and movers, according to
buzz score (http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/buzz/#buzz-04).