Last week, Google released it's Zeitgeist 2011 report, offering insights into how the world searched. The top searches overall are predictable - Rebecca Black, iPhone 5, Casey Anthony - but drilling down into specific categories reveals some pertinent trends in what interested Web searchers this year.
Sentiment analysis firm General Sentiment looked at some of these trends through a different lens. Using over 60 million sources across the Web, General Sentiment analyzed how Web users felt about these top terms. It produced side-by-side comparisons of how popular a term was on Google versus how often it was mentioned on the Web overall. It also noted how positive or negative overall sentiment was. Google searches are clearly not the only judge of a topic's importance on the Web.
Google Books has had trouble on the content side. Google's approach has been too gung-ho, trying to "digitize the world's books" before publishers were ready for it. It also doesn't have the hardware reach that Amazon and Apple have. The only Android tablets taking off are the ones custom-built by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, who obviously prefer their own book businesses.
But Google's game is information. That's how Google Books is positioned - not as a content business or a hardware business, but as an information business. Google wants knowledge to be accessible. The Kindle service might be the best integrated with devices, and iBooks might look great on the demo floor of an Apple Store. But as a set of features for an e-book service, I'm rooting for Google Books.
The Recording Industry Association of America is mad. This time, the ire of the RIAA is not directed at Blogger-hosted sites pointing to zip files of new albums on Megaupload. Nor is it directed at the college students who would dare to click the "download" button on such sites.
Instead, the RIAA is lashing out at Google, whose search engine is the gateway to the Web for hundreds of millions of people. Over the last year or so, Google has been making it a bigger priority to discourage copyright infringement among people who use its various Web services. Those measures, the RIAA has argued, are not enough.
When BRAVO premiered the first-ever art reality TV show last year, pop culture, art, viewers and the Internet got to know each other in a far more intimate, social TV-esque way. Smartphone apps like Google Goggles have fundamentally changed the way we look at art, providing instant information about the work itself. Facebook, Google+ Circles, geo-location service Foursquare, blogging make it possible to engage in discussion around a timely topic, and share and leak news faster. These are all ways that the Internet is changing the user's experience around art.
For the first experiment in looking, go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and then download the Google Goggles app for Android or iPhone. Snap a picture of the art that you're looking at. Goggles will pull up the work of art's history, bibliography of its creator and perhaps even a story of the collection from the Met's mobile-optimized website.
Google+ just announced that feature phone users can now create a Google account. Googler Mohamed Fouad describes this as an effort to enable the hundreds of millions of people with feature phones but no computer access to create an account.
By visiting plus.google.com from a feature phone browser, users can now create a Gmail and Google+ account. This month, Google has extended features of the Web versions of Gmail and Google+ to allow free voice calls to any phone number. Building features for basic mobile phones helps Google extend its reach to a huge, untapped market for Web services.
Google.com is still one of the cleanest, calmest sites on the Web. At least, it is before you start typing. At this point, you don't even have to hit enter before the page starts filling up with noise. Google has been hard at work on its core product this year. The changes have affected search quality in uneven ways.
This year, Google's Panda updates seemed careful and prudent, punishing sites who game the system for better page rank. This was also the year of social SEO, in which the +1 button began to affect search results. Google is also moving away from historical results and toward real-time search. Is Google still as good as it used to be at finding what we're looking for?
YouTube reflected on its banner year today, announcing that it served over 1 trillion playbacks in 2011. "That's about 140 views for every person on the earth," YouTube's Rewind blog post says. YouTube saw record traffic and mobile growth this year. It gets 3 billion views per day, and video uploads have doubled since last year.
Looking at the trends, it's clear YouTube viewers are looking for quick entertainment, music and humor. The report excluded content from major music labels, and it's still full of songs. The most viewed video was "Friday" by Rebecca Black, of course. For the year of a trillion views, the success of this weird, bad video is reassuringly YouTube-like. But YouTube began some major changes and unprecedented deals this year. What will YouTube's next Rewind be like?
In what sounds like its last announcement before the holidays, Google+ has shipped one of its best updates yet. It addresses the noisy the stream with a slider at the top of every circle, allowing users to adjust the volume of that circle within their overall stream. It also adds more information to the notifications menu and makes new events easier to understand.
In a big update for organizations, Google+ Pages can now have up to 50 administrators. Notifications for pages have been rearranged to support multiple managers. Finally, the lightbox for Google+ Photos has been redesigned, improving comments and tagging while keeping the image as the center of attention.
As the go-to place for finding anything on the Web, Google has unique insight into the spirit of the times. The trending Google searches of the year are a glimpse into what's on our minds. For the past 10 years, it has published a year-end Zeitgeist report on the major search trends around the world. Zeitgeist 2011 was released today.
It was a weird year. Perhaps it's not surprising that, of all the grim and tumultuous events that transpired this year, the top Google searches were mostly frivolous. The number one trending search was Rebecca Black. But this year's Zeitgeist site is dynamic, detailed and easy to explore. Drilling down by region reveals some timely insights into what interested the wired world in 2011.
Gmail has updated its fraught iOS app with some new features. It now supports custom signatures for mobile messages and a vacation responder. It also improves the display of nested labels. For users of Apple's newest iOS 5 operating system, the push notification sound has changed to make it distinct from other notifications.
The update also adds an unexpected feature that allows users to scribble with colors on a canvas and attach it to a message. It's a basic paint application that takes advantage of the touch screen, rethinking the way mobile email apps work. Unfortunately, some of the most requested features are still in development. Maybe the ability to scribble will tide users over...
