The searches have been counted and verified, the results are in. Google Zeitgeist 2008 announced today the top google searches for 2008.

Globally, the top 10 fastest rising search terms were:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

In the UK, the top risers:

1. iplayer
2. facebook
3. iphone
4. youtube
5. yahoo mail
6. large hadron collider
7. obama
8. friv
9. cam4
10. jogos

The UK’s top google searches were:

1. facebook
2. bbc
3. youtube
4. ebay
5. games
6. news
7. hotmail
8. bebo
9. yahoo
10. jobs (the only search term here showing any indication of this so called recession)

While our diets are not improving with the fastest rising recipe searches being:

1. cupcake
2. meatballs
3. rocky road
4. crumble topping
5. eaton mess
6. pork belly
7. rhubarb fool
8. lemon posset
9. honey comb
10. beer batter

So what do we want from the internet? Spot the age old questions coming top of the ‘Top of mind’ section:

What is…

1. what is love
2. what is life (Life is… not looking at Google)
3. what is java
4. what is sap
5. what is rss
6. what is scientology
7. what is autism
8. what is lupus
9. what is 3g
10. what is art

Who is…

1. who is obama (Where have these people been hiding?!?)
2. who is mccain
3. who is palin
4. who is lil wayne
5. who is miley cyrus
6. who is dolla
7. who is jonas brothers
8. who is chris brown
9. who is biden
10. who is martin luther

…and how to…

1. how to draw
2. how to kiss
3. how to write
4. how to cook
5. how to tie
6. how to hack
7. how to run
8. how to cite
9. how to paint
10. how to spell (The actual 10th entry was ‘How too Spele but google’s logic kicked in once again)

More people wanted to know how to draw than how to kiss? I suppose one is a perfectly safe natural thing… the other one is kissing… think I’ve got it the wrong way round? read about the kiss of deaf from the BBC. (Who said the TV licence wasn’t worth the money?)

So there we have it, the British don’t seem too bothered by the current credit crisis if this is anything to go on, but are certainly keeping up with World news, playing games and networking. Interestingly enough, this is even before checking their emails… Of course the stats are flawed for this kind of statement as it doesn’t count bookmarks or remembered URLs.

Well this is my last blog of 2008, I’m spending the last two weeks on the tropical island of Mauritius. Happy holidays, merry Christmas and thank you to all those readers, contacts, clients, and so on who have helped Zako Media stay afloat for 2008.

Anna Patterson; a former leader of Google’s search indexing, Tom Costello; her husband who researched and studied search engines at Stanford University and IBM, and Russell Power; also worked at Google on search indexing, Web rankings and spam detection have come together to form Cuil. (pronounced ‘cool’)

Cuil claims to have indexed more pages than Google at a staggering 120 billion web pages. Google last month declared t had discovered over 1 trillion unique pages, but didn’t specify how many it had actually indexed. With insider knowledge at Google, we can only assume they’re right.

Cuil said its search engine goes beyond traditional approaches by analyzing the context of each page and the concepts behind each query so it can provide better rankings by content rather than popularity. Cuil then organizes similar results into groups and sorts them by category. It also offers tabs to clarify subjects, as well as suggestions on how to refine searches.

Check out Cuil here

Opinion? Cuil are trying something new which is always a good way to go about it. Google clones fall within days because they’re trying to copy and are always behind Google’s ever changing ideas. On the other hand, if the pronounciation of your name needs to be added afterwards, how are people going to communicate your brand effectively? It will have to develop its own pronounciation to avoid it being mistaken for its homophonic equivilent.

Testing it’s ‘context’ idea, I searched for ‘Two too to’and had a page of results, none of which talked about English grammar. An identical search on Google however came straight up top with n explanation of the homophones and common mistakes.

The site is also severely lacking features such as news and image search, but that’s exactly why people liked Google in the first place, it was simple, easy-to-use and effective. While testing, I did get a ‘our servers are running a bit hot message’ which is tech speak for, we can’t handle the pressure, but lets see where this leads… Watch this one closely I’d say. No one will beat Google in a day, but give them time and we’ll see what happens.

And why my wife’s site comes up with an image saying ‘born in Japan’ for example which is nowhere on the site is anybody’s guess.

Cuil isn’t the first Google rival to launch this year. Wikia Search, a highly anticipated search engine from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, made its official debut in January. Wikia Search hopes to provide better search results by allowing a community of users to index pages by using their Web page rankings and other suggestions, as well as its own indexing of the Web.