A Year in Ghana Search: Google's Top Searches of 2011

Google announced its annual Zeitgeist, a look at 2011 through the collective eyes of the World Wide Web, offering a unique perspective on the year's major events and hottest trends based on searches conducted in Ghana.

Ahead of Ghana's presidential and parliamentary elections next year, Ghanaians' search interests point to a very close contest between the two major political parties – the incumbent National Democratic Congress (NDC) and the opposition party the New Patriotic Party (NPP) elections next year.

Throughout the year, the number of searches for the NDC and NPP has been extremely close. In April we see a spike in interest in the NPP during their parliamentary primaries and in July we see a similar spike in searches for the NDC as they picked their presidential candidate.

If the Search patterns are anything to go by, then it looks like next year's election is going to be a closely fought race.

On the non-political front, generally, this year's fastest rising searches show that Ghanaians are using social media more than ever before with Facebook and Twitter both featuring on the fastest rising list. The impact of the offline world on the online world was evident in the recent report that made news headlines when a woman was allegedly denied membership to a restaurant in Accra because of the color of her skin. Within days of posting her experience on social media, her blog went viral and the restaurant was shut down.

The 10 fastest rising searches for 2011 also demonstrate Ghanaians' continued love for the world's most popular sport – football – with many people searching for information on the English premier league (EPL), Real Madrid, and Barcelona teams as well as for the great player Lionel Messi.

Other popular search terms, 'HTC' and 'Trader' underline that the future of the web is mobile. Google Trader is a virtual marketplace (web and mobile phone) that allows people to buy and sell anything from electronics to crops by text message and HTC is one of the largest Android and Windows smartphone manufacturers in the world, whose phones became widely available in Ghana this year.

Below is the full list Ghana's fastest rising searches as well as the most search terms in Ghana.

Ghana's Fastest Rising Searches
1. Facebooklogin
2. lovingyou
3. Trader
4.  HTC
5. Twitter
6. Barcelona
7. Messi
8. Real Madrid
9. EPL
10. Translate
Ghana's Top Searches
1. Ghana
2. Download
3. Facebook
4. Yahoo
5. facebook.com
6. Google
7. Love
8. News
9. www.facebook.com
10. youtube
Google revealed the internet 'Zeitgeist' (German for 'the spirit of the times') through an exploration of the billions of search queries we receive each year.

In addition to the Year-end Zeitgeist, which highlights the top trends of 2011, we also have several tools that give insight into global, regional, past and present search trends.

Google Zeitgeist tools can never be used to identify individual users because we rely on anonymized, aggregated counts of how often certain search queries occur over time.

These tools are available year-round for you to play with, explore, and learn from: [insert link to website - note it won't go live until 2pm GMT]

Instructively, Google's innovative search technologies connect millions of people around the world with information every day. Founded in 1998 by Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google today is a top web property in all major global markets. Google's targeted advertising program provides businesses of all sizes with measurable results, while enhancing the overall web experience for users. Google is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.