‘YouTube’ was the fastest-rising Google search term in Ireland during 2007, Google Ireland has revealed, illustrating the phenomenal growth in popularity of the user-generated video site.
The other trend that consolidated its hold over Irish net users was social networking, evidenced by ‘bebo’ being the second fastest-rising search term.
‘Stardoll’, ‘club penguin’ and ‘wikipedia’ made up the top five. In the bottom half of the top 10 table were ‘carzone’, ‘addicting games’, ‘myspace’ ‘meteor’ and ‘fantasy football’.
Interestingly, Google Ireland said up to 25pc of the search queries it gets from Irish users on any given day are new and have not been seen by Google staff before.
The Google Ireland Zeitgeist is calculated by looking at the aggregation of the most popular and fast-rising search queries being typed into the Google.ie search box. It found that Louth people were the biggest searchers for ‘property’, Kildare people for ‘shopping’, Corkonians for ‘election 2007’, Galwegians for ‘politicians’ and ‘driving licence’, Kerry folk for ‘GAA’, Limerick people for ‘rugby’ and ‘Irish music’ and Dubliners for ‘movies’.
Flights were the commodities that most people looked to get cheap on the internet. Flights, holidays and hotels were the most likely search terms to be prefixed by the word ‘cheap’, illustrating the importance of the internet to the tourism sector in increasingly competitive times.
There were high search volumes also for ‘cheap car insurance’, ‘cheap cars’, ‘cheap travel insurance’, ‘cheap tickets’, ‘cheap laptops’, ‘cheap car hire’ and ‘cheap calls’.
The most common searches beginning ‘flights to…’ were ‘flights to australia’, ‘flights to thailand’ and ‘flights to lanzarote’.
Flights to Bulgaria and flights to Canada were more searched for, at fourth and fifth place in the list respectively, than flights to London, Amsterdam or America.
The most common ‘how to’ searches in Ireland were ‘how to kiss’, ‘how to draw’ and ‘how to drive’.
By Niall Byrne
