Google Zeitgeist - Search Trends across the world from Google

Google's Zeitgeist provides an insight into the search behaviours of billions of search queries people typed into Google this year.

http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/zeitgeist2010/

Find out what the top global events are, with fastest rising queries; South Africa's world cup, the Olympics in Canada, Haiti earthquake, Mexico's oil spill or Iceland's ash cloud.

Google provides a visualisation of data from their Insights for Search and Google Trends.

Aussies are searching more and more for social sites this year, with sites like Chatroulette, Formspring, Tumblr and Omegle showing our love for connecting with people and sharing information. We’re also getting into entertainment, with lots of searches for Event cinemas, ABC3 and, of course, the 2010 World Cup

So who were the five most popular people for Australian searches... andy irons, justin bieber, julia gillard, lara bingle and katy perry.

Look to Google Trends http://www.google.com.au/trends to give yourself an immediate update on trending popular searches that you can include in your Social Media topics list.