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Searching for love this Valentine's Day
Cupid's arrows are shooting through the air finding their mark - or missing it completely - depending upon which side of the fence you stand. What is for certain though, is that it's definitely that time of year again. With Valentine's Day already here, Google Zeitgeist (a tool that provides insights into Internet search trends) has revealed some curious and surprising results...
Image courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net and m_bartosch
Most popular 'love' search terms
For South Africans the most popular search terms around 'love' have been 'lyrics', 'quotes' and 'love poems'.
In the last 30 days, the most interest for the search term 'Valentine's day' originates from Gauteng with 'Valentine's day ideas' coming out tops as a popular search. Results also show that 'Gautengers' are the main users looking for love songs on the web.
The search queries that you see as part of Google's Autocomplete are also a reflection of the search activity of web users - South Africans have been looking for the most romantic things to say to a girl, the most romantic songs of 2010 and the most romantic movies amongst others.
Not sure how to express your love to your significant other? Why not try saying 'I love you' in a different language? The most popular languages with South Africans have been Italian, Spanish, French, German, Hebrew and Zulu, with some users looking to find a way to say those three important words in code.
It's interesting to note that the fastest rising searches from the last seven days reflect a number of banking and Internet banking sites - maybe South Africans are double checking how much they have to spend on their loved ones on 14 February?
SA's fastest rising searches, last seven days
Not letting go of the fairytale ideal of romance, worldwide searches for the upcoming royal wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton have led to spikes in search queries for both the wedding and for sapphire engagement rings (like Princess Diana's, which William used to propose), with many users being inspired to create happy endings of their own during this month of love.
Anyone can use Insights for search to come up with their own rankings by visiting http://google.com/insights/search/ and Trends http://www.google.com/trends.
Zeitgeist explained
Google reveals the internet "Zeitgeist" (German for "the spirit of the times") through an exploration of the billions of search queries received each year. There are also several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends. Google Zeitgeist tools can never be used to identify individual users because it only relies on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time. For more information, see: www.google.com/zeitgeist
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