Google, my favorite search engine, calls it the "Zeitgeist," a German word for the spirit of an age, the trend of thought in a particular time.
The Zeitgeist is Google's weekly, monthly - and with 2001, its annual - review of what we obsessively investigate. All day, every day, a count is taken as we read news, celebrities, toys, sports, movies, and music. Thus is the measure of our curiosity assessed.
With more than 150 million queries a day, and extensive logs on those queries, Google should have a sense, as it claims, of "the collective focus of the online mind."
In 2001, our just-departed year, our online minds ranged from our ancestors to celebrities, from patriotism to ancient prophets. And always, it seems, back to babes.
The Google search engine offers a blank page, and a blank slot in which to type, with no prompts, topics such as your horoscope. "You enter what you're thinking. It comes basically from the person's head to the fingertips to Google," explains Barry Schnitt, a spokesman for Google.
So Google suspects it's counting exactly what we're thinking.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
In January 2001, our fingertips were most often typing "Chinese New Year." In April, what we found most irresistible was looking up our grandparents and great-grandparents. That's because the American Family Immigration History Center went online (www.ellisislandrecords.org).
In June, we wondered about Timothy McVeigh, convicted of the Oklahoma City bombing and put to death by lethal injection. For his final statement, he read William Ernest Henley's "Invictus." We looked up the poem.
In July, we were interested in Chandra Levy, the Washington intern who disappeared in April, then became a cause celebre when linked with U.S. Rep. Gary Condit.
In August, we ruthlessly moved on to Aaliyah, a 22-year-old singer who died with eight others in a Bahama plane crash.
In September, for Americans, the world stopped. When we could take a shuddering breath, we wanted to see the World Trade Center, before and after. We wanted to know what happened, who died, who survived.
CNN was the place people went online to find out what was going on, and at a furious rate: more than 6,000 queries a minute on Google. After CNN, our second-most-frequent destination was the World Trade Center, then the BBC, then and the Pentagon, then MSNBC.
Next, with a certain logic, we moved on to the end of the world and Nostradamus. A prophet whose fame likely exceeds his skill, he had the honor of not only being the focus of our fears and curiosity, but also the most misspelled query for the month.
When the "war on terrorism" began, our obsessions shifted to terms of war: daisy cutter, a bomb we've used; bunker buster, a laser-guided bomb used against caves and those in them; and AC-130, a gunship.
But, by the time winter approached, we had moved onto other online concerns, such as mourning Beatle George Harrison, comparing the Xbox to the PlayStation 2, comparing "Harry Potter" to "Lord of the Rings."
Are we curious or shallow? Or both? It could be that online queries reflect only transitory concerns. Or this really could be the zeitgeist of America: celebrities and entertainment, interspersed with intense but transitory concerns about Earth-rattling crises.
It's possible that the deep and lasting don't show up on computers. For that, perhaps, we'd have to enter bedrooms and kitchens, classrooms, libraries, therapists' offices or, at least, Gallup polls.
If you care to ponder this in depth, survey the Top 10 and Top 20 lists provided at www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.html.
by Claudia Smith Brinson
Knight Ridder-Tribune
Just keep this in mind: We might have been curious about anthrax and Osama bin Laden, but we didn't stop looking at Jennifer Lopez.
Claudia Smith Brinson is a columnist for The State in Columbia, S.C.Readers may write at csbrinson@thestate.com.
