Google today released its annual Zeitgeist report.
According to Google, the report takes into account searches on the Web globally to offer a unique perspective on the year’s major events and hottest trends based on searches conducted in the Middle East and across the globe.
This year’s fastest rising searches show a sustained interest in local content, with Dubai, UAE, Emirates, Etisalat and Dubizzle all in the top 25 for the UAE, Google said.
In Egypt, phrases like “Jan 25th Revolution”, “Tahrir square” and “Mubarak’s trial” were all predictably in the top ten, while “hafiz” (a Ministry of Labour website), “Al Jazeera” and “Al Arabiya” all ranked quite high in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, according to the company.
Google also said that these local searches were interspersed with all the usual suspects that pop up around the globe, such as ‘YouTube’, ‘Facebook’ and ‘Twitter’.
“Everyday we get more than one billion searches on Google for information worldwide, and the UAE in particular is the third-fastest growing country in the MENA region in terms of search queries,” said Mohammad Mourad, Google Gulf regional manager.
According to Google, these lists and data visualisations were created using a combination of several tools that give insight into global, regional, and past and present search trends on an aggregated level. Google Zeitgeist tools rely on anonymised, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time, Google said.
According to Google, Facebook, Cricket live, Dubizzle, Samsung, Al Jazeera, Etisalat and Emirates were among the fastest rising searches in the UAE. While
the top five searches in the UAE were as follows:
- Dubai
- Download
- Youtube
- UAE
