It’s a new year once again, folks, and Google usually celebrates year-ends with a Zeitgeist. By definition, “zeitgest” comes from the German terms zeit, which means “time” or “the times,” and geist, which means “ghost” or “spirit” (as in poltergeist). So this means zeitgeist is a celebration or commemoration of the “spirit of the times,” or what relevant events or themes happened in one specific period.

For Google, the zeitgeist is a look back at what was popular in the whole year that passed. Google admits that the trends for the previous years (such as 2004 and 2005) were usually the same–there are those generic terms that always make it to the top searches worldwide. Google says generic search terms include dictionary, ebay, yellow pages, games and maps. Of course, you would expect the usual queries about adult-related matters (and our research–eherm–says these are, indeed, quite numerous).

For 2006, Google considered not only the most popular of searches, but actually more importantly, those that skyrocketed in popularity as compared to the previous year. True enough, these are the searches that one should look into. The regular ones are mostly generic and people will keep looking for games and yellow pages (and adult material, yes). But those that went from the bottom to the top meant that something must be in those keywords.

2006′ top gaining were bebo, myspace, world cup, metacafe, radioblog, wikipedia, video, rebelde, mininova and wiki. At a glance, one would already surmise that Web 2.0 and web applications were very popular in the last year.

Bebo and MySpace are social networking websites. Metacafe is a video sharing community (we wonder why YouTube isn’t included). Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that’s completely user-contributed. Mininova is among the largest torrent tracking services–this is used by users who share files peer-to-peer. Radio blogs is yet another music-playing application that lets users stream music from the Web. Of course, there are the popular searches like the World Cup, which is arguably more popular this year among non-European fans.

If you want to confirm yourself, you can use Google Trends to check the popularity gains of these keywords. Simply go to www.google.com/trends and key in the keyword you want to check out. Better yet, you can use trends to compare across the different keywords.

Here we compare searches for Bebo and MySpace.

The comparison says MySpace is nominally more popular than Bebo for the period. However, Bebo rose from virtually nonexistent in 2005 to something in 2006. And that says a lot.

Now we tried checking out trends for “world cup.” What do you know–the term was quite unpopular for the rest of the period apart from 2006.

Google trends can be a fun tool to use to know what people love looking for. Of course, Google is likely to have shortcut tools that would tell them oturight what’s popular (I hear they even have LCD screens around the Googleplex that gives a live readout of what people are currently searching).