What would the final few days of the year be without lists of top events for 2006?  I've already reminisced a few times: Google's 2006, Microsoft's 2006 & Apple's 2006.  Google has joined the fray of websites looking back over the past year with their annual End of the Year Google Zeitgeist.  2006's is already up and contains 6 categories of lists, charts, and graphs depicting what 2006 was all about… based on what people were searching Google for.

Some of my favorites include:

• "How to scream" was the 5th most popular 'how to' search
• The top 5 'what is' searches included these terms:  1) Hezbollah 2) Soma 3) Zovirax 4) Xanax 5) Ultram.  The searches were actually for the chemical names of the drugs.  What does it say about society when some of the most popular things on people's minds are terrorists, muscle relaxers (Soma), herpes (Zovirax), anti-anxiety (Xanax), and pain killers (Ultram)?  Are people getting anxious about terrorists, going out to mix drinks with their muscle relaxers, getting drunk and being promiscuous, and taking medication for their painful herpes?  Just something to think about.
• I think I might be on to something with that last one.  The #1 definition searched for… get this… "promiscuous"
• Politics, wars, and scandals captivated a lot of people
• American Idol trampled Dancing With the Stars and Project Runway as far as Google searches go

The Google Blog has an interesting write-up on just how Google went about selecting the top terms for their 2006 Zeitgeist.  They don't just take the top search terms in each category.  As the Google Blog points out, that would create pretty basic lists of terms like 'ebay', 'dictionary', 'games', and 'maps'.  Instead, Google compares the popularity of search terms with their popularity last year.  The lists are then comprised based on how much more popular a search was this year than last year.

It's interesting to see how they did it.  But how valid do you think it is?  Keep in mind that the purpose of the Zeitgeist is to show a snapshot of what people were interested in for the year.  Would a straight, popular search terms list better represent the year?