Battlefield 3 is 2011's big winner in video games search terms

Google has released its annual “Zeitgeist” list of the most popular search terms of the year, and the video game results may surprise you. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s fascinating stuff.

The biggest news: Battlefield 3 was the #5 fastest-rising search term of the year globally, peaking during the week it arrived in stores (duh). In the U.S., the top video game search terms (Google doesn’t list other nations’ video games search terms) were:

1. Black Ops
2. Call of Duty
3. Halo: Reach
4. Super Mario
5. Mortal Kombat
6. Skyrim
7. Battlefield 3
8. Dragon Age 2
9. Diablo 3
10. Mass Effect 3

While the top “Online Games” searches were:

1. WOW
2. addicting games
3. free online games
4. Miniclip
5. Webkinz
6. tower defense
7. kids games
8. armor games
9. Tetris
10. Juegos

One of the more unusual lists is “Fastest Rising Costumes” search terms, and of those, “Angry Birds costume” was #1. (“Minecraft costume” came in at #9.)

Strangely, the #2 “Movie” search term of 2011 was Batman: Arkham City. Muh-heh?

Over in the U.K., the fastest rising overall search terms included FIFA 12 at #2 and Minecraft at #8.

For ages, it’s been rumored that Google was planning a social network to rival Facebook, since Facebook has radically changed the way so many of us use the web. Google has finally unveiled its next big thing, but it’s not a social network at all. It’s more of a “social search” function built into its popular search engine results.

“Google +1” is a direct competitor to Facebook’s ever-present “Like” button, and you can try it out right now. It hasn’t been implemented for all users yet, but if you opt in to Google +1, you can mark the websites you like best. When one of your Google friends or contacts (via Google Profiles) runs a similar search, they’ll see your +1 likes as a sort of personal advice/recommendation. (You have to have a public Profile to activate the +1 feature.) It adds a more social aspect to web search, and it makes a whole lot of sense once you see it in practice.

It remains to be seen if Google +1 will be able to successfully compete with Facebook’s Like button, since Facebook has such a huge head start. But like Facebook, Google is expected to have its +1 button showing up on other webpages (like the one you’re reading now), paid ads, and lots more.

I despise searching in iTunes. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a major Applehead. But iTunes’ search is one area where Steve seriously dropped the ball. It’s painfully slow and ridiculously disorganized, a failure in every way.

One user decided he had enough, so he created iTunes Instant, an easy, browser-based search engine for iTunes. Not sure how he managed it, especially since Apple’s not known for being fond of other people meddling in their source code. Regardless, iTunes Instant works a lot like Google’s new instant search feature, pulling up results while you’re typing. No wait, no muss, no fuss.

Here’s the kicker: iTunes Instant was created by Stephen Ou, who’s just 15 years old.

You should, because Google wants you to notice.

They’ve added some fancy fading in of everything but the search box and logo, so that header and footer menu items only appear if you move your mouse while on the home page.

Fancy, huh?

I know Google’s a pretty big company but I wonder how much R&D time was taken from other projects to sort this little gem out.

Is Google running out of ideas?

I love this section of today’s announcement, which sums up the numerous variations they tried out on test groups:

…the variant of the homepage we are launching today was positive or neutral on all key metrics, except one: time to first action. At first, this worried us a bit: Google is all about getting you where you are going faster — how could we launch something that potentially slowed users down? Then, we realized: we want users to notice this change… and it does take time to notice something (though in this case, only milliseconds!). Our goal then became to understand whether or not over time the users began to use the homepage even more efficiently than the control group and, sure enough, that was the trend we observed.

OK, it’s late and I’m thick, but I don’t really get it, Google.

Not only have you put a ton of code (relatively speaking) on the front page that probably doesn’t even work in IE6 (has anyone tested it? Do we care? Oh wait, Google hates Microsoft. Never mind.) but you’ve intentionally planned to slow down users.

It’s not as if you’re showing them ads.

You’ve been able to search straight away by typing into the box as soon as you arrive at Google, thanks to a small bit of JavaScript that focuses on the search box.

You still can.

Now, if you want “Advanced Search” or any of the other searches you usually find on the home page, you have to move your mouse first.

An interesting thing happens in Safari on the Mac. If you have the Tab key set up to run through menu items, the first time you press “Tab” you land on the “Google Search” button. You then have to tab through all the stuff at the bottom before you make it back up to the top left menu (Web – Images – Videos etc.)

No biggie you might think, but it seems as if some degree of accessibility has been lost, and for what I see as mainly aesthetic feature. It may not bother mouse users, but how about those who use the keyboard to navigate web pages?

I tried testing this in Firefox for Mac, but the fade-in effect doesn’t (yet) work at all.

Hey, this is Forever Geek, so you’d expect some thorough testing.

If you don’t think this is thorough enough, please help me out by testing it out on other OS X, Windows and Linux browsers. What happens?

Do you like the effect? I think it’s OK, and that’s about it. I don’t see (sigh) the need.

Yeah it’s a silly game, but quite fun. Taking it further, here are some more that are worth taking a look at:

Geeks are…

Nerds are…

Steve Jobs is…

Steve Ballmer is…

Apple is…

Microsoft is…

Linux is…

LeapFish, a multi-dimensional search engine that combines the best of the web in a single search, recently announced the release of its new click-free search interface that delivers search results as you type. The brand new search engine that captures not just relevancy but also the variety of the web, now offers one of the world’s fastest search services with instantaneous results as each character of a search term is entered.

LeapFish is an all-in-one time saver that eliminates clicks and keystrokes coupled with a nimble search application that allows you to modify search characters and get instantaneous results on-the-fly.

LeapFish pushes search to 2.0 and states “out with the search button.” LeapFish’s revolutionary new click free search interface gives life to a fast, fluid and dynamic search experience that extracts the variety of data from major online destinations such as Google, YouTube, Ebay and others in a single search query. Consolidating a knowledge base of relevancy and variety from major online authorities, LeapFish effectively renders more comprehensive results than those returned by its providers.

Editor’s note: This is a sponsored review written upon request by LeapFish.