
Google Zeitgeist 2013 - martinbc
http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?zg=full
======
Keyframe
What a shitty user experience. What changed at google? They used to have these
rather simple, useful, UIs.

~~~
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.

~~~
devcpp
Exactly. After all, it's pretty much how Apple made its historic unprecedented
profits: more designers than engineers.

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

~~~
boomzilla
Yes, it's trending searches, not most popular ones. By the way, non-
engineers/non-analytical people usually have trouble differentiating the two.
I can't recall how many meetings with product/business people that I have to
explain the concepts.

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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.

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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](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.

~~~
Recoil42
And it still fucking breaks scroll.

------
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?

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

[https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-sY_z8MNs](https://www.youtube.com/embed/Lv-
sY_z8MNs)

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

~~~
eamsen
Flash is installed, no blocking add-ons were used. For that matter, I have
disabled all other add-ons, that could be interfering and still get the same
result.

It could be a flash (64 bit) issue. Also, that's not the video that would show
for me, because of localization (Germany). Despite my preference for the
English language and google.com over google.de, Google tries to show me this
video instead:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hVwx13k1QM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8hVwx13k1QM)
.

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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..

~~~
wavefunction
Or maybe the new Google. Or the same Google we always had.

~~~
brokenparser
You're saying it's a 0 or a 1?

~~~
wavefunction
It's definitely a 13 74/9ths

------
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.

------
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.

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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.

------
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)

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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

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stevenspasbo
All I'm seeing is a blue screen. Macbook, using Chrome.

