Get a grip

As Elisa notes, there was a lot of moaning and groaning about our Year-End Zeitgeist. Clearly, there's no pleasing everyone. We attempted to explain something that's essentially a complicated and interesting problem: what queries capture the essence of the year? This turns out to be very different than "what are the top searches every year?" No matter who's compiling them, the constant top queries are likely to be the usual search-box-as-browser stuff: games. wallpaper. music. ebay. yahoo mail. google. and of course various boring sexual terms (even XXX shows up). So is that interesting? Not so much. But other than Elisa's comments, and Nick Carr's funny take (and maybe Owen Thomas'? but the Business 2.0 blogs are poorly ID'd, so I'm not sure), most of the others grumbled, as I guess they are wont to do.