EcoMeme: Green & Googled in 2009
Google’s annual most-searched-terms report, Zeitgeist 2009: The Collective Consciousness, came out this week (Dec. 1). It included a category called Keeping it Green within its United States, In The News page. Keeping It Green rankings were based on search terms within the subcategory of “green energy,” the report notes with an asterisk.
No offense, solar and renewable energy, but there’s more to the green movement than y’all! That’s why we ferreted out other green keywords and concepts we could find charting throughout the U.S. Zeitgeist 2009 report.
Sticking to the news page, under the category of In the Economy, “cash for clunkers” charted at number two of 10 terms, behind the all encompassing “crisis,” while “green” charted at the eighth most searched, economy-related term in Google News. In last year’s Zeitgeist 2008, nothing seriously green cracked the top 10 in the economy category.
Within regional searches in 2009 public transit searches ranked in the top 10, including BART schedules at nine for San Francisco, the MTA Trip Planner and Hopstop.com at three and six for New York City, the Madison, Wisconsin Metro schedule at six for that region, and in Chicago, at two and four, the CTA bus planner and RTA Trip Planner.
Finally, on a page of household-related searches, vegetarian foods were among the top 10 Recipe searches with hummus at number seven outranking meatballs and even apple pie. Among the fastest-rising searches around the globe in the food and drink category, the Acai Berry topped the list.
Zeitgeist reports don’t reflect the same categories year over year, exactly. And as search and business guru John Batelle griped in his own blog on Tuesday, results didn’t reflect December 2009 searches on Google.
But, let’s hope they’ll make Green a permanent Zeitgeist feature, and help sway the “collective consciousness” to the environmentally responsible side.
Basic Reading:
A news brief at TechCrunch comparing Bing’s year-end reports of most-searched terms, to Google’s, written by Robin Wauters.
Blogger Michael d’Estries on Ecorazzi delights that the term “picnic” is on the rise.
Further Resources:
The official Google blog entry, introducing the Zeitgeist: 2009 report.
A slideshow at the Huffington Post reflects the Zeitgeist 2009 results.
An Information Week news feature by Thomas Claburn, comparing results of year end, search-trend reports by Yahoo!, Bing and Google.
Image: Spencer E Holtaway
This is the latest installment of EcoMeme, a column featuring eco news, tech and business highlights by Lora Kolodny.
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