The Zeitgeist is the spirit of the age or spirit of the time, as described on Wikipedia, it is the intellectual fashion or dominant school of thought which typifies and influences the culture of a period.
Google every year tries to reveal the Zeitgeist of the world from its most searched topics.
The site’s description briefly says: “2012 was a year of big moments, from global games to historical elections and everything in between. With this site, we’ve analyzed over one trillion queries to showcase what the world searched for. Our year-end Zeitgeist is just a small sampling of the queries and search trends that we found interesting this year. Go beyond what we’ve shared here by using these tools to discover more about global and regional search terms over time.[…] We filtered out spam and repeat queries to build lists that best reflect the spirit of 2012.”
The Google Zeitgeist 2012 website shows the world’s most searched topics split into overall searches, people, concerts, events, movies, books and many more categories. Users can also split up the statistics by country, and depending on the category, see results as “trending” searches or “most searched”. “Trending” is defined as search queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period in 2012 as compared to 2011. “Most searched” ranks items by the largest volume of searches.
Browsing Google Zeitgeist 2012 by country and choosing Italy there are 10 “Trending” (Searches, People, Concerts, Exhibitions, Films, Books, Tickets for football matches, How to, What does it mean?, Recipes) and 2 “Most Searched” topics (Areas in Google Maps, Local Places in Google Maps) that sum up the Italians’ behavior on Google and therefore their choices and their tastes.
What’s really interesting for us is to read the “Most Searched” Areas in Google Map where they appear the 10 most popular areas of Italy during 2012 and find out the 5th and 7th place in the ranking respectively occupied by Salento and Porto Selvaggio. This makes us proud and encourages us to continue in our work, especially if we think that when we started in 2004 the words “Salento” and “Porto Selvaggio” were considered an error by search engines and users were taken to other places.