Crawls performed by Internet Archive on behalf of the National Library of Australia. This data is currently not publicly accessible. ||||| Starting in 1996, Alexa Internet has been donating their crawl data to the Internet Archive. Flowing in every day, these data are added to the Wayback Machine after an embargo period.
– There's no way to sugarcoat this: We are one shallow nation. Google today revealed its annual Zeitgeist, in which it crunches billions of Google searches "to capture the year's 10 fastest-rising global queries and the rest of the spirit of 2011." Here's what the spirit of this year was comprised of: Rebecca Black, Google+, Ryan Dunn, Casey Anthony, and Battlefield 3. And what's beyond the top 5 is only slightly more encouraging, and much more Apple-flavored: (the non-existent) iPhone 5, Adele, TEPCO, Steve Jobs, and iPad 2. Writing for Gizmodo, Sam Biddle notes that "we should all be ashamed of ourselves"—sorta. Luckily, "our zeitgeist isn't a series of persistent trends, or the truly influential. It's people and things that were tossed in the grease pit of the global consciousness, fizzed for a while, and then burned out—tablet fire sales, memes, fake weddings, Google+." So it's not what really mattered. Thank goodness. You can search the list by a ton of different categories and countries; click to dig in.