Google Zeitgeist: 2012 in world's eyes

Search giant Google has released its annual Zeitgeist video and review, showcasing how the world searched during 2012. The video highlighted a huge number of events, and noted how people searched for the curious, for firsts, for a choice, for change, and for "something special". Snippets were shown of Felix Baumgartner's supersonic freefall, Oscar Pistorius's prosthetic leg, political rallies and protests, relief efforts, the Mars Rover landings, and more. Additionally, respect was paid to a number of famous figures who passed on in 2012, including Neil Armstrong.

On the website itself, Google listed both trending queries – those that had the highest amount of sustained traffic during 2012 as compared with 2011 – and a seemingly random selection of most-searched terms on a country-by-country basis. Worldwide, the top 10 trending searches were 'Whitney Houston', 'Gangnam Style', 'Hurricane Sandy', 'iPad 3', 'Diablo 3', 'Kate Middleton', 'Olympics 2012', 'Amanda Todd', 'Michael Clarke Duncan', and 'BBB12'. The top image search was 'One Direction', and The Hunger Games topped the feature-films trending list.

As for the UK, the trending list was predictably topped by 'Euro 2012' and 'Olympic tickets', with the remaining eight slots being 'Whitney Houston', 'Kate Middleton', 'April Jones', 'Neflix', 'Natwest Online', 'iPad 3', 'Gary Barlow' and 'Gangnam Style'. The UK's most-searched lists were for Royal Family, TV shows and in-country Olympians, topped by Queen Elizabeth, Big Brother and Andy Murray, respectively.