Google Zimbabwe’s 2011 top searches: ‘Facebook replaces Zimbabwe’

Google yesterday released this year’s Zeitgeist – a yearly roundup of the most popular things people around the world searched for on the world’s biggest search engine. Some 48 lucky countries also got a breakdown of topics of searches, e.g. news, sports, images, soccer etc…  For Zimbabwe and others like us we headed to the regular Google insights for search to get our ‘What mattered in 2011’ list.

So, what did Zimbabweans search for in 2011? We checked two search categories;  Web Search and News Search.

Web Search Interest

The Web Search Interest of the year list is as follows:

1. facebook
2. zimbabwe
3. news
4. herald
5. gmail
6. yahoo
7. pictures
8. www.facebook.com
9. mail
10. newsday

The top 5 rising searches under Web Search are the following:

1. mujuru
2. opera mini
3. facebooklogin
4. opera
5. daily news

 

News Search Interest

1. zimbabwe
2. news
3. zimbabwe news
4. herald
5. daily news
6. zimbabwe herald
7. newsday
8. facebook
9. mugabe
10. libya

And for the top 5 rising searches under News Search:

1. daily news
2. gaddafi
3. libya
4. newsday zimbabwe
5. newsday

The most noticeable change on the top web searches when compared to last year’s top searches, is that “Zimbabwe” the most popular web search term in 2010, has been replaced by “Facebook”. Not sure if this means Zimbabweans are now more interested in logging onto Facebook than knowing about their country.  One clear suggestion though to derive from this is that the web is getting more and more an everyday common man (social) tool than just the work and educational tool it was before.

A noticeable trend in 2011’s web search is that there has been an increased interest in the Opera Mobile browser. For a country where mobile devices are become the first (and only) internet device for many new users, this is not really surprising.  Opera is known for being the best browser to use to save as much data as possible on mobile broadband bundles. It’s also known to work well with many feature phones.

Global top searches

The global 2011 Fastest Growing Queries list is as follows:

1. Rebecca Black
2. Google+
3. Ryan Dunn
4. Casey Anthony
5. Battlefield 3
6. iPhone 5
7. Adele
8. TEPCO (Japanese electric utility company)
9. Steve Jobs
10. iPad2

Google has also released the short video which features 2011’s top events. Great video to watch if you have enough data to spare: