Summary 2002 by Google

2003/03/01 Hernandez Piris, Gregorio - InformatikariaEleka Ingeniaritza Linguistikoa Iturria: Elhuyar aldizkaria

• Internet

On the other hand, Google Zeitgeist offers a special view of the most important events of the year and rising trends. It serves to see where people's concerns have gone, how interest in a specific topic has increased or decreased, or, without deepening so much, for banal issues, as for example the most important character on the Internet, according to the number of searches.

Top Ten Searches

In Google they change logo to celebrate special days like the new year.

Perhaps the most attractive section is that of Top Ten searches. Google offers many options in this section. In view of last year’s data, in general, the most sought after term was ‘Spiderman’, reflecting the success of this film last year. In the music section, Emin and Shakira were kings and in sport David Beckham and Anna Kournikova. It is curious to find Las Ketchup among the most numerous searches, but it is more curious to see the history of these searches by countries. In Spain, the month of May was the largest number of searches, in June Aserejé arrived in Italy and at the end of the year in Germany, the United States and the United Kingdom danced with that melody, while in Spain they were already fashionable.

Google statistics also serve to understand the cultural differences or differences existing between countries. In the UK, France and the US, the most sought after woman was Britney Spears, while in Japan, among the ten most sought after women, there is no Western woman.

In addition to analyzing the search terms, Google analyzes from where, in what language and from which platform (operating system and browser) searches are made. The main language is English, since half of the searches were conducted using this language. He is followed by German (four times less than English), followed by Japanese and Spanish, both quite high. They were used eight times less than English.

On operating systems, Windows 98 was the most used, with 37%, 26% of Windows XP users and 20% of Windows 2000. Therefore, Windows remains a leader in operating systems, as the number of operating systems that are not Windows is 8%. As for browsers, Microsoft also predominates, as Internet Explorer is the most used browser.

The data mentioned here can be taken as curiosities, but through the Internet numerous sociological, demographic and political investigations are carried out. The Internet had 18 million users in 1995 and 167 million users in March 2001. Researchers look for the reasons for this rapid growth and, in addition to researching user searches to know what and how the network is used, they have analyzed how the email is used: what news they read, what they buy and why they have used the chat, etc. As a curiosity, it is worth mentioning the study that analyzes the attacks of September 2001 and the use that Americans make of the Internet. They did not use it as the main news source, but as a television and telephone supplement (the telephone network was saturated) and above all they felt angry.

We can also find more research of this type in the Internet statistics and demography section of the Google directory and, how not, every month in Google Zeitgeist to view strange data.

The chart below shows how the number of searches for the term 'The Ketchup' has been modified throughout the year. The data correspond to five countries.