It seems Canadians couldn't get enough of a (formerly) dowdy singing sensation from Britain and a confusing respiratory bug this year.
Google Canada has unveiled its annual list of the year's top searches and "swine flu" and "Susan Boyle" top the list.
Each year, the widely used search engine assembles a compendium of the billions of queries that people around the world have typed into Google search to reveal the year's zeitgeist -- the spirit of the times.
Here's this year's Google Fastest-Rising News Search list in Canada:
- swine flu
- Susan Boyle
- Natasha Richardson
- Jon and Kate
- H1N1
- flu
- Rihanna
- New Moon
- Chris Brown
- Michael Jackson
Andrew Swartz of Google Canada says it's not surprising swine flu topped the list -- and appeared again in two other ways -- given how the illness dominated the news this year.
"When you see a search item like that that's serious, that's mixed in with pop culture, you know that people are really thinking about it and searching for information," Swartz told CTV's Canada AM.
The fact that the term "swine flu" was not on anyone's lips (or fingertips) last year also explains why it made the list. The fastest rising search tracks the speed at which a search term rises in popularity. So a perpetually popular search, such as the local weather, will not make the list, but a term that is suddenly a hot topic -- like H1N1 -- will.
Natasha Richardson also made the list for the same reason: searches for her before her accident were probably few; that changed with her sudden death at Mont Tremblant, Que.
"Perhaps because it happened in Canada, people were very engaged and interested in that story," says Swartz.
The same can be said of Justin Bieber, the 15-year-old Canadian who posted videos of himself singing in his bathroom on YouTube, only to find himself a record deal and a fan in Usher. A year ago, no one knew to search for him; this year, his popularity took off.
The zeitgeist picture offered by Google in the U.S. is fairly similar to that in Canada, though there are a few differences. Here's the U.S. list of fastest-rising search terms:
- swine flu
- Susan Boyle
- Jon and Kate
- Adam Lambert
- Rihanna (Chris Brown)
- New Moon
- inauguration
- Michael Jackson
- Nadya Suleman
- missing link found
While Richardson and Bieber are absent from the U.S. list, Adam Lambert managed to push himself to the fourth position, yet is absent on the Canadian list.
Yahoo! Canada also released its list of hot search terms for 2009, called the Buzz Index, and interestingly, it reveals quite different results.
On the Yahoo list, the National Hockey League is tops. RuneScape, a free, multi-player online role-playing game -- and last year's No. 1 -- took the No. 2 spot, ahead of UFC and WWE.
Michael Jackson made it to No. 5 on the list, followed by actress Megan Fox, "American Idol," NASCAR and the NBA. The only term that both lists have in common is Susan Boyle, who rounds out Yahoo's top 10.
The index also reveals that "Twilight" was the top movie searched, "American Idol" was the top TV show, Michael Jackson was the top celebrity, swine flu was the top news story and Sidney Crosby was the most searched athlete.
