Google’s 2006 Top Searches are Not Really

After much controversy and criticism about it’s 2006 top searches list which started after terms such as “bebo” topped the list while the service itself is not as popular. Google came out and publicly commented about the way in which they measure those results.

In their clarification, Google writes today:

we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period — the truth is, they don’t change that much from year to year…Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006’s most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005. (”Bebo”, for example, had very little traffic in 2005.) We also gave a bit higher score to searches with more traffic. Similarly, our “what is” and “who is” lists are not necessarily the absolute most frequent searches, but rather those that best represent the passing year.

Personally, this explanation simply doesn’t make any sense because Myspace which was popular last year (#1) is still popular this year (#2) and obviously haven’t showed that much growth.

[via TechCrunch]