TORONTO - The meteoric rise of Twitter, the love for Canada's game, and the laziness of web surfers were highlighted in Google and Yahoo's annual lists of the year's top search queries, which were released Tuesday.
According to Google, the world's most popular search engine, Canadians searched most for Facebook, YouTube, lyrics, weather, Hotmail, Google, games, Yahoo, map and Kijiji. The Top 10 list was virtually identical to 2008's.
Many of those entries reflect how Internet users often use searches as a shortcut to their favourite websites -- even if they're only saving a few keystrokes by not typing "www.," ".ca" or ".com.
"We do think maybe people are using Google as a bit of a navigator, it could also be they're looking for news related to those things," said Google Canada's Tamara Micner.
After stripping out those entries, Google highlighted the search terms that had the greatest volume increase in the last year: Twitter, Blackberry, Yahoo mail, Accesd (a French financial website), Craigslist, Natasha Richardson, Justin Bieber, New Moon, Michael Jackson and Google Street View.
Those searches represent "the pulse of the year," said Micner.
"There's some trends that jumped out at us -- one would be social tools for sure. Canadians are interested in socializing and interacting online, as we saw with Twitter, YouTube and Facebook."
Twitter was also the fastest-rising search word for Google users in the U.S. and Brazil, while globally the top query was Michael Jackson.
Yahoo also parses out some of the more common searches to compile its annual "buzz index," omitting company names and general terms like movies, downloads and hockey.
The top Canadian search word was NHL, followed by RuneScape, UFC, WWE, Michael Jackson, actress Megan Fox, "American Idol," NASCAR, NBA and singing sensation Susan Boyle.
"NHL has always been a very strong term in Canada," said Yahoo spokesman Huw Evans.
"Last year was a bit of an anomaly because RuneScape (an online multi-player game) took over the top spot but the NHL is the biggest league for Canadians by a long way in our searches."
Yahoo's most popular news searches were for H1N1, the Iran election and the murder of Victoria Stafford, compared to Google News' Top 3 of swine flu, Susan Boyle and Natasha Richardson.
Canadian Yahoo users generally exhibit the same searching habits as their international counterparts with one notable exception, Evans said.
"We see a lot more searches on weather than we see on average in the U.S.," Evans said with a laugh.
The top searches by Canadians through Microsoft's new Bing search engine were for Facebook, YouTube, Kijiji, Plenty of Fish (dating website), Canada 411, CNN, Megan Fox, Air Canada, West Jet and Michael Jackson.
Google also tallied the top Canadian "how to" searches, the most popular being how to kiss, followed by how to draw, flirt, meditate, crochet, sing, hack, dance, paint and fight.
Yahoo said Sidney Crosby, Tiger Woods and Manny Pacquiao were the most searched-for athletes by Canadians, while Michael Jackson, Megan Fox and Susan Boyle topped the celebrity list.
