Above — Global trends: Fastest rising / Below — Facebook vs Twitter.

It’s the Google Zeitgeist time of year again, here to demonstrate to me that I have no idea who is famous these days or what real people do online. Facebook just makes it into the top 10 fastest rising search terms, though if you compare it to Twitter, it is much more popular in sheer volume. In fact, it’s much bigger than anything else here.

Amusingly, ‘chatroulette’ tops the list in almost every region, with ‘ipad’ and ‘iphone 4’ always up there too.

Google Zeitgeist 2010: Global / UK

Most of these terms are simply lazy searches from people who can’t be bothered to find a bookmark or type in the URL for ‘hotmail sign in’. I’m exactly the same:

You can easily see your own web history trends. Luckily mine are fairly respectable, and you can see I’ve actually searched for ‘google’ rather a lot! This is because Chrome and Firefox run a Google search whenever you enter a non-URL term into the address bar – though I do always perform a search when I’m looking for addresses I’m less sure about. The most amusing terms are ‘ellipsis’ and ‘bullet’ which I often use when I want to copy and paste these characters (… & •), usually for a Twitter post.