zeit·geist | Pronunciation: 'tsIt-"gIst, 'zIt | Function: noun | Etymology: German, from Zeit (time) + Geist (spirit) | Date: 1884 | Meaning: the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era.

So, the NSA taps your phones but doesn’t bother to let you know what it knows. Google, with billions of bits of search data at its fingertips, is a little more forthcoming.

With Google Zeitgeist, Google shows you what’s hot in the world of search engine searches, revealing sometimes surprising cultural patterns and trends. Google won’t tell you what the most searched terms are, exactly, but Zeitgeist will show you the terms that gained the most ground that week. Plus, Zeitgeist breaks down popular search terms into a few different categories for comparison’s sake, which also removes the data another step from its raw form. Google’s minions also filter out sexual search terms from Zeitgeist, so there will be no record of the great “blow job” search pandemic of March 2003.

Google Zeitgeist and all its experimental offshoots are endlessly fascinating. Click EasyEdit to add your own uses and thoughts to the list below:

Google Trends

Google Trends, a cousin to Zeitgeist,shows you the trajectory of one search term over time. See the volume of any search term over the last three years. What terms are hot? Which are sinking? Who is more popular this year than in 2004? Who isn’t? Google Trends is addictive.

Google Monitor

Want to track the popularity of certain keywords, or see how your site ranks compared to another? Download Google Monitor. With it, you can find the position of your website in Google Top for popular keywords and get more traffic from Google. Google Monitor will query Google and show you the position of your site by your target keywords and also how well your competitors are doing. It keeps statistics for several URLs and several lists of keywords.

Google Fight

Google Fight compares two search terms to show you which is more popular in the Googleverse. Plus, there’s stick-man kung-fu fighting as you wait for your results. Have “boy” fight “girl;” “Batman” fight “Robin.” And see what other terms people are fighting with: “OJ Simpson” vs. “Homer Simpson,” hotdog vs. hamburger.

Google Share

Google Share searches the popularity of search terms set within the context of a primary search term. Which political party is more popular in Kentucky? Google Share says Republican, because that term scored 1.8% of Kentucky hits while Democrats only managed 1.1%.

Land Geist

Land Geist combines Google Zeitgeist and Google Share along with a world map that gives you a global view of which countries rank highest (via Google Share) for any given search term. Interestingly, the creator of this application prefers AlltheWeb to Google as a search engine.


See also:

• Froogle
• Fun With Google
• Gmail
• Google Book Search
• Google Calendar
• Google Groups

• Google Maps
• Google News
• Google Search Tips
• Image Search
• Your Website and Google