After a tumultuous year of natural disasters, terror attacks, celebrity hoopla, dead popes, and pop-star courtroom shenanigans, Google has released its 2005 Year-End Zeitgeist to give us a “selective view of our collective year.” Who knew a graphic rendition of the year would look like a bunch of wavy lines? My head hurts. Darn techies.

I’m sitting here with Buzz Bruggeman, CEO of ActiveWords. He picked me up from the airport tonight. I have spent the last few hours telling him all about the Google Zeitgeist conference.

Media and Internet luminaries will be on hand to chat about all kinds of topics at Google’s invitation-only event – with no reporting allowed.

There are two types of popular search reports. The first kind gives users a cleaned-up version so they won’t offend their visitors and users.

As the ability to search massive amounts of data on the Internet becomes more and more apart of our day to day living, it’s easy to see what search patterns the majority of users follow.

Ever wonder what the heck people search for on Google? Wonder no more! Google summaries it’s history of search terms each week, month and year, categorized by various subjects and countries of origin.

Google has launched a new tool called Google Suggest that will suggest search terms as you type them.

According to Google Zeitgeist, the internet based Drudge Report is the third most searched for news source as of October, 2004.

There has been a running discussion among the SEO community about whether or not going through the efforts of optimizing web content for Hispanic visitors is a valid exercise. Some believe that optimizing and marketing towards a community that isn’t known as being search engine savvy (a misconception) isn’t a worthwhile endeavor.

The gruesome beheading video of Nick Berg has become the most queried item in search engines, according to Terra Lycos’ Weekly Top 50. The site which initially aired the video, Muntada al-Ansar, was 3rd on Lycos’ list.