Google Zeitgeist 2013

[Keyframe]

What a shitty user experience. What changed at google? They used to have these rather simple, useful, UIs.

[josteink]

I don't even know what I'm looking at here.

It renders incorrectly, had zero info and just shows me pictures of Hollywood celebrities.

[agildehaus]

Designers and product managers have taken the reigns from the engineers.

Recall that Google at one time never had TV advertisements. Now you can't turn the damn thing on without seeing one.

[yalogin]

Wow. I am not the only one that felt like this.

That was such a horribly designed UI. I had no idea what I am looking at and why. Google used to all about simplicity. I remember in prior years these kind of posts always had graphs and considerable text explaining trends. Its like someone there realized they are JS experts.

[jlarocco]

In Chrome I get an empty dark blue screen unless I tell Ghostery not to block the Google +1 tracker.

[scholia]

I hit the button to say exactly that, but you beat me to it. It's unbelievably bad, even by Google's rapidly declining standards....

[schandur]

I gave the video about 2 seconds before closing the tab.

[nettletea]

You seriously mean to tell me that the most popular search on Google for 2013 is 'Paul Walker' followed by 'iPhone 5s'? What? Surely 'Weather' would be higher. I simply don't know what I'm looking at here.

[chaz]

It's actually "Top 100 [Trending] Searches." They could have been more clear about that.

http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013

[aroch]

Fairly sure they've filtered out what might constitute "low importance" searched like terms such as 'weather'. Searches for the weather probably remain relatively stable and don't really tell us anything.

[fvrghl]

I also wondered why the death of Paul Walker was in the video. Surely Lou Reed was more influential, yet his death wasn't mentioned.

[chimeracoder]

I imagine this is a variant of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation[0]. Informally, this will identify words "most associated" with 2013, which is not the same thing as the most searched words in 2013.

Put another way, unless there's a huge spike of interest in the weather in 2013 compared to other years, "weather" won't be included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_dirichlet_allocation

[martingordon]

Scrolling is backwards on my Mac. I'm using the default ("natural") scrolling, where swiping up scrolls down, but this page is set to scroll down with a swipe down.

Probably has to do with the fact that they're rendering the images in a canvas element rather than plain old HTML.

It's also broken on iPads. You can't see the bottom nav in portrait and the site is slightly too large for the viewport when viewed in landscape.

[CaveTech]

I think it might be intentional. I don't use natural scrolling and it's broken for me as well.

[joecurry]

I would prefer a .txt file list over this, I can't even tell the order without individual clicks.

[uncoder0]

http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts#date=2013. Not a text file but, a much better format than the op.

Edit: Apparently this is linked in the bottom left corner of the page... totally missed it. What an effective site design.

[wavefunction]

That would make sense if this were something that was intended to be useful and meaningful. I think this is just supposed to remind you that Google is a thing.

[sgustard]

The actual data is so boring (hint: Miley Cyrus) that it's purely an exercise in wasteful over-engineering.

[eamsen]

Google Zeitgeist 2013: black box.

The video doesn't load for me on Firefox. It is probably just a bug and will be fixed but it coincidentally prints the correct picture of Google's current stance on browser compatibility. Anyone else thinks that the silent conversion tactics are slowly becoming more obvious?

[yapcguy]

Consider yourself fortunate you can't watch the video.

It's exactly the kind of maudlin crap we have come to expect from politically correct tech companies.

[dingaling]

Flashblock catches it for me in FF25, the video is actually

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-sY_z8MNs

Perhaps you don't have Flash installed, you lucky thing.

[brokenparser]

The video appears to be an mp4 (the network monitor says so) and it should work fine (it does here). Please ensure you have the latest FF version, available from https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/all/ (in case the update fails).

[franze]

what a horrible, horrible browsing experience on desktop. this is a complete new kind of swipeware/pseudo-metro crap...

[scrrr]

yeah, it's very non-Google somehow..

[mcgwiz]

Did I miss something or is 2013 already over?

Also, didn't find any mention of NSA or Snowden. Sadly, I wasn't surprised.

[eamsen]

Snowden is #97 for me. I suspect that the results are localized (Germany for me).

[beaker52]

Edward Snowden not in top 100.

Goes to show my assumption that he would be says that I'm subject to a large degree of bias.

[dec0dedab0de]

While I read almost every HN post I saw about Snowden, I don't think I searched his name at all. In fact, I can't remember searching anything news related this year. I'm sure I have, but its really not necessary anymore. I wonder if others are starting to get into similar patterns.

[k-mcgrady]

Is the top 100 actually the top 100? I'm sure it's filtered quite a bit.

[ouggnay]

Edward Snowden is #97.

[xemoka]

I'm usually quite impressed by Google's Zeitgeist videos, this one was disappointing however. It's short (a minute shorter than 2012 and 2011), doesn't include many of the important events of the year, and is rather uninspiring. What happened?

[oneeyedpigeon]

Breaks the back button :-(

[nettletea]

It's a hideous UI, all I want is a text list of top searches for the year, and to be able to filter by category.

Stealing my touch scroll isn't that nice either. I struggled to read beyond the fold.

[headgasket]

This UI reminds me of Encarta 98.

[VladRussian2]

nice. Black dead rectangle in the center of bluish background. No interaction anywhere. Firefox. If it doesn't work in FF, it doesn't work.

[hsivonen]

Requires login? Why?

[gpmcadam]

I think it's just a default Google thing. Basically, it notices you're logged in but you haven't entered your password for a while, so it prompts you to login again.

Instead, I just clicked 'Log out and log in as a different user', closed the tab, and clicked the link again on HN, and it worked just fine.

So in short, it doesn't require you to be logged in, unless you are, at which point you have to log in again.

Bizarre.

[aasarava]

I wonder if most people didn't even notice that because they remain logged in to Google services all the time.

[aaronetz]

Chrome on Windows 7 bug report: back button doesn't work, mouse wheel doesn't work (scrolls at infinitesimal speed), touch-screen style controls which don't work well with a mouse (click&drag, besides not being intuitive with a mouse, is also broken because it navigates to the selected item on mouse button release)

[fmax30]

The first few times i visited this , i was looking for a way to access more content then quit half way round. I tried scrolling down , it didn't work . I had to click a link on the left corner of my screen which wasn't even that visible to me. Affordance = 0.

[chacham15]

There must be something wrong with this list when Edward Snowden is at #97 and Paul Walker is #2.

To make this more clear: Snowden was the top Google search for many days, perhaps as long as the incident of Paul Walkers death until now.

[jmedwards]

That wasn't a patch on the 2012 Zeitgeist that Google put together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xY_MUB8adEQ

[hartator]

"When you finally get at that's point of acceptance, there is nothing more beautiful"

Showing a woman with a scarf...

Come on google, just go already.

[CisSovereign]

I'm on chrome and it was super clunky. Skipped a ton on scroll.