What Are We Searching For?

Each year, Google, the most popular search engine, releases 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. This year, in addition to the predictable current events, celebrities and trends summing up 2006, Google's list seems to support the idea behind Time magazine's Person of the Year award, which was given to "You."
The top search terms were words related to user-generated content, such as blogs, social networking sites and podcasts.
Metacafe is a competitor to YouTube, the leading online video site, which surprisingly did not make Google's global top 10 list, while Radioblog is a tool used for streaming audio on a Web site.
"Zeitgeist, to us, is a measure of the pushpins in the bulletin board of worldwide understanding of what we want to know," said Douglas Merrill, Google's vice president of engineering, who analyzes the most rapidly growing search terms every week for clues about the online world's interests. "It's things in the world we want to care about."
In terms of news, the world is unequivocally interested in Paris Hilton, the socialite celebrity who topped Google's most-searched-for on the search engine's news site, which posts the most current news stories from a variety of outlets. Hilton was followed by actor Orlando Bloom and then cancer.
This year's news list contained a hodgepodge of topics, from serious to frivolous. Podcasting came in at No. 4, followed by Hurricane Katrina and bankruptcy. The list continues with Martina Hingis, a tennis star; autism; the NFL draft; and "Celebrity Big Brother."