Hit list

By WONG LI ZA
wongliza@thestar.com.my 

MALAYSIANS were more interested in Datuk Siti Nurhaliza than Paris Hilton last year, according to Google’s Malaysia Year-end Zeitgeist 2007. 

Malaysia’s darling: Siti Nurhaliza was more popular than Paris Hilton (bottom, right) in searches for famous personalities last year.

Hot off the stove, the Google Zeitgeist highlights the most popular and fastest-rising search terms that Malaysians typed into Google.com.my last year.  

Released on Monday, it found that Siti Nurhaliza was more popular than Hilton in searches for famous personalities and that Genting Highlands and Langkawi topped the list for destination searches. 

The Zeitgeist also showed strong growth in searches for social networks and video sites. 

Originally a German expression that means “the spirit of the age or times”, Zeitgeist describes the intellectual and cultural climate of an era. 

The survey is thus named because, according to Google, people use the search engine to look for new and interesting subjects. When that is viewed in volume, it tends to be a good reflection of what’s on everyone’s mind. 

The Google Zeitgeist, which revealed that up to 25% of search queries received on any given day were new, is calculated by looking at the aggregate of the most popular and fastest-rising search queries typed into the google.com.my search box.  

Results showed that the top 10 searches in 2007 were friendster, youtube, berita harian, myspace, harian metro, utusan malaysia, wikipedia, airasia, maybank2u and jobstreet. 

On the other hand, the fastest-rising searches were youtube, facebook, firefly, esnips, mobik, veoh, transformers, friendster layout, heroes and tudou (largest video-sharing site in Mandarin). 

Besides Siti Nurhaliza and Paris Hilton, Malaysians were also interested in celebrities like Britney Spears, Akon, Avril Lavigne and Megan Fox. 

Other people that were most searched online were Paul Tan (a blogger who writes about cars and the automotive industry), Nurin Jazlin, Jeff Ooi and Altantuya. 

Top destinations googled last year were Genting, Langkawi, Singapore, Penang, Bali, Cameron Highlands, Malacca, Port Dickson, Bukit Tinggi and Kuala Lumpur. (Looks like Malaysians really opted to “Cuti-cuti Malaysia”.) 

In terms of online entertainment activity, topping the list were friendster (social networking), youtube (video site), myspace (social networking), games (free online games), naruto (Japanese anime), metacafe (video site), facebook (social networking), imeem (music, photo, video site), photobucket (photo and video site) and lowyat (Malaysian tech enthusiasts’ resource community). 

Football fans mostly sought out soccernet, epl, manchester united, arsenal, liverpool, chelsea, uefa, fantasy premier league, fantasy football and fam. 

Top searches for movies, TV programmes or radio were gsc, tgv, transformers, heroes, radioblog, era, prison break, cineleisure, hitfm and high school musical. 

For games, the hottest topics included miniclip, barbie, maplesea (cartoon games), pokemon, sudoku, gamespot 305 (source of games from playstation, xbox, wii, etc), runescape, utopia, ghost online and animax. 

MP3 135, iphone and Nokia 6300 topped the list in terms of tech gadgets googled. 

Finally, the Google Zeitgeist also showed that the majority of searches done in Malay were jawatan kosong, resepi, akademi fantasia, mat rempit, cuti-cuti malaysia, kamus, lagu, lirik, portal pendidikan and cerita.

source: the star online