I managed to post excerpts before posting the article - pardon the reverse order this week. The latest column, one that tries to get past the surface of the 2006 trends and look much deeper (even into the long tail of searches), starts below and continues in the extended entry (it's of course also at MediaPost).
Happy New Year!
David
2006 Trends: The Year That Wasn't
By David Berkowitz
The search engines’ lists of the top searches for 2006 signaled a slow news year. How could a year that felt so fulfilling appear to be about nothing? To find out, we’ll have to look far deeper than the list of the search trends that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft’s Live Search, and Lycos released.
These lists of top search terms shouldn’t be revered as infallible almanacs of human inquiry. They’re filtered, censored, and spun, often leading to laughable results. They do, however, offer in aggregate a reflection of the past year, even if the reflection is of the sort you’d find in a funhouse mirror.
All four search engines’ roundups included top news search queries. If an anthropologist were to review them, he might conclude that nothing happened in 2006. Consider Google Zeitgeist, which has no actual 2006 headlines represented in its list. The only one that comes close, “Hurricane Katrina,” is a story from the year before. It joins Paris Hilton and Orlando Bloom, who head up the list, along with cancer, podcasting, bankruptcy, autism, and the 2006 NFL draft. A Google spokesperson clarified that Zeitgeist’s lists “are not necessarily the most top searched terms of 2006.” (Google’s full response and other thoughts on 2006 search trends not included here are posted on my blog.)
The other three engines’ lists are more credible, though they again signal a year where little happened. Yahoo’s top two searches involve celebrity deaths (Steve Irwin and Anna Nicole’s son). To Yahoo’s credit, its list is the only one to mention the Israel-Lebanon war, the US midterm elections, Fidel Castro’s stroke, Saddam Hussein’s trial, and that controversial Danish political cartoon. Then again, it was also the only list mentioning the JonBenet Ramsey murder confession (fittingly this year, the confessor didn’t even commit the crime; the real story was that he didn’t do it).
Yahoo also mentioned the North Korea nuclear threat, which appeared on Microsoft’s list as well. Somehow Lycos’ was the only list that included Iran. Even the dictators felt more entertaining than menacing, though perhaps that was just because of how cute Katie Couric made them sound on the evening news. Saddam hasn’t been in power in years, Kim Jong Il may or may not have tested nukes, Fidel may or may not be alive anymore, and Ahmadinejad, the most downright evil this year, came off as such a tub-thumper that it’s easy to forget he bankrolls terrorists. Even so, that’s hardly news.
Sadly, not a single list mentioned the Darfur genocide, the resurgence of interest in AIDS, the advances in microfinancing that won Muhammad Yunus the Nobel Prize, the philanthropic largesse by the likes of Warren Buffett and Bill Gates, the debates about immigration, or the YouTube revolution featured as Time’s Man of the Year (it was such a slow news year, Time picked an Idea of the Year instead). It was a year of doing nothing about Iraq, Darfur, North Korea, Iran, Afghanistan, Katrina, AIDS, Hugo Chavez, peace in Israel, immigration, stem cells, gay marriage, gas prices, obesity, or Tom Cruise (a top news item on Microsoft’s list, and a devotee of a non-religion). The news items also don’t include Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitism, Michael Richards’s racism, and Borat’s sendup of American anti-Semitism and racism. Also missing: O.J. Simpson, who was to air a pseudo-confession of a crime he says he didn’t commit.
The more I review the top-ten lists, the more I appreciate Yahoo’s honesty. Its top overall searches overlap almost entirely with its top celebrity searches. Nine of the top ten celebrities are women, and most are more famous for their looks or scandals than talent. The celebrities in spots 1, 5, and 10 on the overall list (Britney, Paris, Lindsay) all were photographed not wearing underwear, epitomizing a year where not doing anything was the best way to grab headlines.
Yahoo’s list may not be perfect, but it captures the spirit of a year where the real news was in absentia and celebrities were more than happy to fill the void. The stars who tried too hard to be real, like Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie pouring the hearts into Africa, were shunned by those searching for the superficial news.
For me, it felt like a momentous year, having both met the love of my life and signed on to the role of a lifetime within weeks of each other. Maybe that’s the long-tail effect kicking in. En masse, we might be searching for Britney and MySpace and Steve Irwin. Yet the searches that matter most to us, like apartment hunting and health questions and travel plans and birthday presents for loved ones, don’t show up in the top-ten lists. It reminds me of the moral of The Little Prince: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux,” “What’s important is invisible to the eyes.” The more the search matters, the less it will scale.
And so, in the year where nothing happened, things happened great and small for everyone. All searches are local, and personal, and meaningful, except when we unite in distractions and read about Britney’s latest antics on an otherwise slow news day.
There’s never a real absence of news. Each one of us fills the void in our own way, and then searches for help in filling it however we can. Even if the news is about nothing, a search is always for something.
