Like every end of year, Google has just published its Zeitgeist 2009. For those of you who wouldn’t have heard of Zeitgeist, it is a German expression meaning “the spirit of the times” (cf. Wikipedia). Basically, Google Zeitgeist was meant to summarize a year of searches by American internet users as a way to picture a specific year with keywords. Luckily, Zeitgeist is not limited to the USA, it also gives us some interesting data about other countries in the world and even about the European Union. Yes, Google did it for our democracy made up with “491 million people, 27 nations and 23 official languages”! So what do we learn?

This won’t be a surprise but despite the fact that we had such an intense and important year for EU democracy (European Parliament elections in June, Lisbon treaty, nominations of the new European Coucil president and of the High Representative for foreign affairs), Europeans are not interested in EU politics!

Google Zeitgeist 2009 - EU

2009 will be remembered as the year of social media (Facebook and Twitter ahead), but also as the year of music with singers Lady Gaga, Susan Boyle and Michael Jackson, not to mention the Eurovision song contest and the internet music rising star Spotify. Out of these mainstream keywords, there also seems to be a particular interest for reality TV with a huge buzz in the UK and throughout Europe around Jade Goody’s last days, but also in France with Secret Story 3. In the end, only one serious topic was sought by German speakers: swine flu (Schweinegrippe)!

The rest of the statistics is available on Google…