Searching for wiki
It was nice to see “wiki” as the 5th fastest rising search term here in Australia in Google’s 2008 zeitgeist which was published this week.
Wiki was also amongst the top 10 rising search terms in The Netherlands (5th), New Zealand (5th), Switzerland (6th), Italy (8th), Sweden (8th), Finland (9th), and Singapore (9th). The home page lists wiki as the 10th fastest rising for the UK as well, but the world page does not.
The only place where Wiki was within the top 10 most popular, rather than fastest rising, was Singapore. However, Wikipedia appears on the most popular list for a few countries, including Switzerland (4th), Austria (6th), Hong Kong (6th), Finland (7th), and Germany (7th).
For Russia, википедия (meaning Wikipedia) was the 3rd fastest rising. I didn’t recognise any other translations of wiki or Wikipedia on the lists (although I’m a bit surprised I would recognise википедия!)
In theory, it would be possible to extract similar data for Wikia Search. The metrics section contains info on the number of times each term was searched for and the trends section lets you compare multiple terms. Like the rest of Wikia Search, this data is available under a free license, making it possible for anyone to reuse the data to create their own zeitgeist. For example, the graph below shows the number of daily searches for the word “wiki” on Wikia Search.
Wikia
WikiChix
