Google recently released its 2010 Zeitgeist, the dissertation of the search terms people were Googling most over the course of the year. While it’s fascinating that Chatroulette, the iPad and Justin Bieber made the national top ten list while other, more substantive topics did not, here at DCist, we’re a little bit more intrigued about what people around Washington were searching for.
It’s nothing to brag about, but Jiffy Lube Live — the former Nissan Pavilion — was the number one search term for “Washington, D.C.” in 2010. The full list:
- jiffy lube live
- founding farmers
- gwmail
- fcps blackboard
- nova community college
- weather dc
- fcps.edu
- gaylord national harbor
- metro dc
- e street cinema
Holdovers from last year’s list: “fcps blackboard,” the Fairfax County public school system’s online learning tool which dropped from first to fourth; “e street cinema,” which dropped from third to tenth, and “nova community college,” which went from fourth to fifth. Of course, it’s worth noting that Baltimore’s top ten list is calculated seperately from Washington’s — which certainly helps explain the lack of Maryland-related searches on the list.
So what does the list tell us? Not too much. I guess if you really wanted to, you could pull some incredibly simple extrapolations. “wtop news,” “nationals baseball,” and “dc restaurant week” didn’t make the cut this year, so one might make the stretch and argue that the region’s Googling was slightly less District-centric. “wmata” was replaced by “metro dc,” which makes some sense, I suppose. And people are either really interested in Founding Farmers, or just can’t remember the restaurant’s URL. (Probably a bit of both.)
Trying to make wide-ranging conclusions based on this tiny slice of information is silly, of course — it’s much more fun to sit back and laugh at the fact that there are a ton of people plugging “jiffy lube live” into Google over and over again.
