Google fastest rising U.S. search terms for 2007*:

As another year comes to an end, it’s always fun to look back and reflect on what happened, what we accomplished, where we went and so on. As a Geek, here’s my contribution. With no further adieu, here are the 2007 Top 10 Google searches…

Google fastest rising U.S. search terms for 2007*:

1. iPhone: iPhone, the Apple mobile phone with music and video player and web browsing features tops the Google top searches 2007 list.
2. Webkinz: Webkinz is a stuffed animal that customers can register and play with online.
3. TMZ: A telepictures production and America Online joint venture that provides an inside look at the latest celebrity scandals.
4. Transformer toys: Transformers are highly flexible toys that shift shape, and became wildly popular from the 2007 hit movie transformers
5. YouTube: online video-sharing site
6. Club Penguin: Networking site for children
7. MySpace: Social networking site
8. Heroes: Heroes is an American science fiction serial drama television series created by Tim Kring on NBC.
9. Facebook: Social/business networking site
10. Anna Nicole Smith: Anna Nicole Smith was an American sex symbol, model, actress, celebrity, and spokeswoman.

And for those of you who are partial to Yahoo, here you go…

Yahoo Top 10 Searches for 2007*:

1. Britney Spears: An American pop music singer, songwriter, dancer actress and author.
2. WWE: World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. (WWE) is a publicly traded, privately controlled integrated media (focusing in television, Internet, and live events), and sports entertainment company dealing primarily in the professional wrestling industry, with major revenue sources also coming from film, music, product licensing, and direct product sales.
3. Paris Hilton: An American celebutante, businesswoman, singer, model, actress, author, and television personality.
4. Naruto: Japanese manga series written and illustrated by Masashi Kishimotoanime adaptation. The main character, Naruto Uzumaki, is a loud, hyperactive, unpredictable adolescent ninja who constantly searches for recognition and aspires to become a Hokage, the ninja in the village acknowledged as the leader and the strongest of all.
5. Beyonce: An American R&B singer, songwriter, record producer, music video director, actress, dancer, and fashion designer, the creative force and lead singer of the R&B girl group Destiny’s Child, the world’s best-selling female group of all time.
6. Lindsay Lohan: An American actress and pop music singer.
7. Rune Scape: The massive online adventure game by Jagex Ltd
8. Fantasy Football: A fantasy sports game in which participants (called “owners”) are arranged into a league.
9. Fergie: An American pop, hip hop, and R&B singer, songwriter, and actress.
10. Jessica Alba: An American actress, whose TV and film credits include Dark Angel, Honey, Sin City, Fantastic Four, Into the Blue, Idle Hands and 2007’s Good Luck Chuck.

*According to MandarinMusing.com and several other sites I Googled.

So what does this tell us? Aside from the fact that the war in Iraq, politics, health, or anything else of anyreal significance didn’t make the list, two things are very clear to me:

For one thing, based on the content of these searches, I think we can say with a decent amount of certainty that our parents were not the ones Googling Britney Spears, or MySpace. No, these top 10 lists, were probably the result of millions of Gen X and Yers, who were raised on pop culture.

Minus the iPhone and possibly YouTube, Fantasy Football and Heros, these two lists are overwhelminglygeared to younger generations that appear to be very in tune, or at least curious, about current events within pop culture. Celebrities, television and the Internet – these account for 85% of the most popular searches on Google and Yahoo(the Google list is technically the fastest rising search – I could not find an actual Top 10 list – maybe in a few weeks). Only the iPhone, Naruto and Transformer Toys could be argued not to fit in those categories.

Another thing I noticed is that Google and Yahoo, for the most part, have very distinct and different search content. Again, this might be because the Google list is based on the fastest rising searches, but for the sake of this blog, we’ll ignore that.

Google’s list is predominantly Internet (networking and entertainment oriented) focused. It appears that Googlers are less interested in celebrities and care more about networking and being connected with the world. Or perhaps it’s not that those who use Google are this way, but rather that people use Google, opposed to Yahoo, when they want to search for technology related topics.

Yahoo on the other hand, has 6 out of it’s top 10 searches, focused on celebrities – young, attractive (for the most part), female celebrities at that. Compare that to Google’s lone celebrity search of Anna Nicole Smith!

Has Google claimed the technology niche and Yahoo owns celebrity gossip?

And check out the irony of these two photos! I image Googled “Google” and found the photo on the left, on the fifth page. When I Googled “Yahoo,” the first image I saw was this one of the right…labeled as “MOST POPULAR YAHOO IMAGE EVER!”

What happened on Yahoo’s search engine? Try it yourself…

Well, however you want to break it down, it’s clear that pop culture is a hot topic and online networking is in. For us bloggers, should we be talking more about Britney and Jessica to optimize our SEO? I doubt most of us can relate Britney and our business together, or even if we could, I doubt we’d have much “authority” on her, to even make the first 10 pages of a search return.

I guess what I’m saying is, pay attention to who and what’s out there. Would you have guessed most of the items that made these lists? Would you have thought they’d be so age specific? Generation X and Y…are these lists really representative of who we are?