After Microsoft (Yahoo’s powering search engine company) has released its Bing’s top searches for 2011, Yahoo is also summarizing this year in search by publishing a real comprehensive section called 2011 Year In Review- It is covering the top 2011 searches in many languages from 17 different countries around the world.
Let’s take our most representing country (United States), which has the most searches every month (more than 3 billion) and holds one of the biggest Yahoo’s local market share (slightly above 15% for October 2011), and try to learn what is mostly attracting people for our work from home businesses.
Top General Searches
- iPhone
- Casey Anthony
- Kim Kardashian
- Katy Perry
- Jennifer Lopez
- Lindsay Lohan
- American Idol
- Jennifer Aniston
- Japan Earthquake
- Osama Bin Laden
It appears that Yahoo users are loving to search for female celebrities- No less than five female stars are appearing on the list! However, the iPhone (that made a lot of noise with its 4S and the rumored 5 version) and the Casey Anthony trial took the first two places.
Top News Stories Searches
- Casey Anthony Trial
- Japan Earthquake and Tsunami
- Royal Wedding
- Death of Osama Bin Laden
- Unemployment
- Arizona Shooting
- Death of Amy Winehouse
- Arab Spring
- Libya/Death of Moammar Gadhafi
- Occupy Wall Street
There isn’t any obvious pattern of news searches as people were searching for queries from varied topics and matters. It seems that people are searching for news in Yahoo for everything that it is currently hot with no special preference.
Top Obsessions Searches
- Charlie Sheen
- The Rapture
- “Friday” (Rebecca Black)
- Mortgage Rates
- Extreme Couponing
- Angry Birds
- Planking
- Game of Thrones
- Government Shutdown
- Tiger Mom
Those highly momentary trending search queries (the best definition i could think of) presents a list of queries that people were searching over and over at a certain period of time. I chose to highlight it also because it is interesting to see what kind of stuff people are “obsessed” with.