Casey Anthony, Rebecca Black Among 2011's Most-Googled Names
Casey Anthony, who was charged with and subsequently acquitted of the murder of her 2-year-old daughter in Florida, and YouTube sensation Rebecca Black are among the names that clicked the most with global Internet users in 2011, according to Internet search giant Google.
Searches for Anthony grew 2,680 percent from 2010 to 2011, putting her into the fourth spot of fastest rising searches on Google, according to a list titled, “Zeitgeist 2011: How the World Searched,” released Thursday.
A jury declared Anthony, whose daughter’s remains were found in December 2008 in a wooded area near her home in Orlando, not guilty on July 5, 2011. But she was convicted of misdemeanor counts of lying to police officers. She had lied to her family and friends repeatedly about the whereabouts of her daughter, Caylee, who had gone missing in 2008, sending investigators on a “wild goose chase,” when all the while she knew that Caylee was dead.
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Topping the list was Black, who made a big splash on the Internet with the release of her 2011 pop single “Friday.” The music video catapulted the then 13-year-old to celebrity status after the video went viral, receiving over 167 million views on YouTube. Searches for Black jumped over 10,000 percent between 2010 and 2011.
The recent social media venture Google+ got the second spot on the list. In the three weeks following its announcement in June, Google+ amassed a user base of more than 10 million people. Searches for Google+ also rose by more than 10,000 percent.
Grabbing the third spot was the Ohio native Ryan Dunn, best known for his daredevil stunts on the reality TV shows “Jackass” and “Viva La Bam.” Dunn lost his life in a car accident on June 20. The volume of searches for Dunn also grew over 10,000 percent in 2011.
The fifth spot went to the first-person shooter video game, Battlefield 3, which sold 5 million copies in its first week; followed by iPhone 5, which got the sixth spot. British singer-songwriter Adele, who rocked the music industry with the release of her sophomore album “21,” which sold 208,000 copies in the U.K. in its first week, nabbed seventh place. The TEPCO (Fukushima I Plant) in Japan, whose nuclear reactors were damaged badly in the 2011 earthquake, got the eighth spot. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who died in October, grabbed the ninth spot, followed by iPad 2 in tenth place.
Rebecca Black and Google+ were the top two hottest search terms, respectively, both globally and in the United States.
The other top eight search terms in North America included Hurricane Irene, Pinterest (a vision board-styled social photo sharing website and app where users can create and manage theme-based image collections), Dunn, iPhone 5, Anthony, Adele, Osama Bin Laden and Jobs, in that order.
