The 2005 Google Zeitgeist is out.

What is the Zeitgeist?

Well Zeitgeist stands for “the spirit of a time” or “the outlook of a generation”.

Google’s Zeitgeist lets you know what happened in Google during 2005. You can find out top search terms, top news items, biggest gainers from the past year, etc. One of the really cool features is if you click on the tabs at the top. You can click on World Affairs, Movies, Celebrities, Nature, or Phenomena. This will let you see a graphical view of the popularity of these items.

Lets take a look at celebrities of 2005.

You can see for example for search terms based on Martha Stewart and Donald Trump and you can chart their popularity over the past year. You can see modest spikes when their shows go on air, and very large spikes around news events like Donald’s wedding and Martha’s release from prison.

Let’s take a look at movies. This is a really interesting break down to me. You can track the terms like Star Wars Movie and Star Wars DVD and track the popularity. When the movie is released for example the searches for DVD spike as well. Why is this significant? What if you had a site where you marketed DVDs. What if you posted on your blog during this time or shortly before the movie is released and talk about the DVDs. Might that help you get some extra traffic to your site and maybe even a few extra sales?

Brad Fallon pointed me to a Seth Godin article on his blog where he points out that several people responded to the New York strike immediately and got Google AdWords campaigns up for those terms… Imagine how many times yesterday people were searching on “NY Strike”, “New York Strike”, “Transit Strike”, etc.

If you are an internet marketer in 2006 make some extra money by paying attention to the news!

- Ben Fitts

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