Michael Jackson: King of Pop and King of Google for 2009

In the digital age, there are few things that say more about our culture than what we search for online, and with billions of searches performed everyday, no other company in the world has its finger on the pulse of society quite like Google. Every year since 2001, Google has compiled the most popular searches around the world into an annual end of the year analysis called Zeitgeist. Whether you’re a fan of Google or not, the Zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the times,” always manages to provide some interesting insights into our collective consciousness.

So what were the results of Zeitgeist 2009? In the wake of his untimely death, searches for Michael Jackson exploded, placing the King of Pop firmly at the top of the global list. The graph below even shows how a number of Michael Jackson songs spiked in search volume following his death.

While Jackson was the king of Google worldwide, in the United States, he came in second to social networking website Twitter. Some of the other notable searches on the U.S. Zeitgeist list were  Facebook at number three and hi5 at number five, showing that social networking in general is on the rise. Conversely, some of the things that trended down in Google search globally included U.S. President Barack Obama, deceased actor Heath Ledger, and perennial tabloid favorite Amy Winehouse.

Here’s an explanation of Google’s methodology for compiling the Zeitgeist report.

To compile the 2009 Year-End Zeitgeist, we studied the aggregation of billions of queries people typed into Google search this year. We use data from multiple sources, including Insights for Search, Google Trends and internal data tools. We also filter out spam and repeat queries to build out lists that best reflect “the spirit of the times.” All of the search queries we studied are anonymous—no personal information was used.

Except where noted, all of these search terms are most popular for 2009—ranked in order of the queries with the largest volume of searches this year. In some cases, we list the “fastest rising” queries, which means we found the most popular searches conducted in 2009 and then ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2008. Conversely, “fastest falling” queries were very popular in 2008 but flattened in popularity in 2009.