If we can learn one thing on television at the moment, then it is that end-of-the-year reviews are best broadcasted in the middle of the running year to get the best ratings. It seems Yahoo has learned and is already online with a review of the most popular searches of 2007 for both Germany and the USA – in Australia they pulled out all the stops of television and had a woman read this stuff. High time for me to take a look in the keyword-database and see what changed.

The division of the hundred most common searches into brand names, generic keywords and entered URLs shows interesting trends: Just like the AOL-users in the past, we have more and more users who just plug URLs into a searchengine and hope that the searchengine will redirect them. This is not something that went past the searchengines unnoticed – a few weeks ago Google transitioned from redirecting every URL to showing fitting, further sites for some URLs. Nearly half of the searchqueries are brand names. It is nice if you hold the rights to those brands but not so nice if you massively loose potential traffic that way. For generic keywords like Routenplaner (route planning), Wetter (weather) or Immobilien (real estate) only 27 percent are left in the end. This admittedly grows considerably the longer the tail gets but it still holds reason for thoughts.

There are no big surprises in the top-15 keywords of the year seeing they are largely identical to the ones of last year. Solely Knut, Berlin's polar bear, has made it on the list thanks to massive media presence and can therefore be crowned this years top-celebrity. The keyword with the most, interesting input-variation should be Google: from Googel to Goggle up to Googl, everything is represented. How will it turn out once one of the innovative double-vowel-startups becomes a well-established brand? Incidentally, not one politician can be found on the top-1000 list. For those of you who would still like to rummage around in the list, you are welcome to download the top-1000-list here (11kB) – all informations, just like on TV in a few hours, are without guarantee :-)