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Google has released their Year-End Google Zeitgeist report, showing what everyone's been searching for this year. Interesting how heavily weighted toward the end of the year many of the stats are: not just the "gaining queries" list, which you'd expect (depending on how they define that term), but also, for example, the fact that the top movie searches are for Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings (followed, admittedly, by some summer blockbusters).

I find their timeline of the year particularly interesting as a measure of what interests people. (Note that "Nostradamus" shot way up in the rankings around noon on Sept. 11; my guess would be that this was due largely to that fake Nostradamus prediction about the "two brothers" that made the rounds in email that day.) Of course, the Google people themselves influence how the zeitgeist appears; I'm guessing the timeline doesn't show every interesting peak of the year, and I'm guessing they're doing some filtering on the data (such as including misspellings), and I'm guessing that their categorization for the top-10 lists has to be done to a certain degree by hand, like any categorization. (Deciding to look at "brands," for instance, as a category.) (Oh, and there are some stats that probably get biased by invisible factors. Apple isn't on the top-10 brands list, despite some major announcements (OS X, TiBook, iBook, iPod); that may well be simply because it has such a small market share, but it may also be partly because people who are into Apple know to look on apple.com for Apple-related stuff. Though you'd think that people would know to look on cnn.com instead of searching for cnn, so I'm probably wrong about that.) Still, interesting stuff, at least if you're interested in seeing what Net-enabled people are interested in.

Note that there are even a few non-American searches on some lists; in particular, the most-searched-for TV show is a French reality-TV show called Loft Story.