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29th Mar 2024

What Europeans really care about

  • HALLOWEEN - American style "trick or treating" swept Europe on 31 October (Photo: EUobserver)

What do Halloween, Finnish local elections and the UK subsidiary of Iceland's Landisbanki have in common?

They came out top in a new Google study measuring the fastest rising web search queries in the 27 EU states during October 2008.

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The EU top 10 Google Searches is published from 18 November 2008 in EUobserver. Google will continue to create the list for EUobserver on a monthly basis.

The study suggests Europeans are passionate about escaping from their stock market and political concerns - by searching for entertainment topics such as local television, video game and lottery information.

The American export of Halloween came in at number one. Finland's municipal elections, held on 26 October, came in second. Financial worries also figured, particularly when they hit individual wallets: the collapse of the UK subsidiary of Iceland's Landisbanki frightened depositors.

The study measures percentage spikes in searches, not overall search volume. This allows small countries such as Finland and Austria to figure in the results, if an event prompted a sudden surge in interest.

The EU top 10 is powered by a suite of tools called Google Zeitgeist that offer insight into global, regional, past and present search trends.

"'Zeitgeist' means 'the spirit of the times' and Google reveals this spirit through the aggregation of millions of search queries we receive every day," says Bill Echikson, Google's senior manager for communications in Brussels.

"We believe this particular EU search from Google tells us more about what really interests Europeans and we look forward very much to share this tool with our readers," said Lisbeth Kirk, editor-in-chief of EUobserver.

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