Google has released their 2008 year-end Zeitgeist (top searches for the year 2008), and Sarah Palin was the number one filtered search term for 2008. Wheres Obama? He holds the number one position in the US Zeitgeist, but didnt even make the global top 5 fastest rising. A small part of me cried when I saw the Jonas Brothers had cracked the top 10. Here is the complete global top 10:

1. sarah palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti (Spanish social network)
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa (Polish social network)
8. wer kennt wen (German social network)
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

Perhaps most impressive, however, is the fact that four of the top ten terms were for specific social networking sites.

As always, Zeitgeist doesnt actually represent the most popular search terms of the year. The terms on this list are the fastest rising search terms worldwide. As Google explains,

Fastest rising means we looked at the most popular searches conducted for 11 months of 2008 (we compile this list by early December) and ranked them based on how much their frequency increased compared to 2007.

For the first time, Googles Zeitgeist includes search data for 35 countries. In addition to the overall top 10 search queries, users will be able to find search data on images, books, translate and news searches.

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