As pointed out in a recent forum comment, a very interesting tool has been provided by the folks at Google. Their "Google Zeitgeist" is a public view into their attempts to summarize the top searches for a given year arranged into geographic regions and by major categories. By looking at a particular category should yield a set of the ten most popular topics searched for by people from around the world.

How they (Google) actually aggregates these billions of searches entered by the vast number of Internet users worldwide into a small set of discrete topics is a bit of a puzzle to ponder over. Of course, these views must be backed by some powerful heuristic approaches wherein sorting algorithms are used to "build out lists that best reflect the spirit of the times". On a positive note, they do take the important step of data normalization to show (visualize) relative relationships between segments of time and between the ten topics for a given category.

• The number one worldwide news item concerns searches about the Fukushima disaster.
  Starting in March (of course) it rose to the top overall news spot.

Drilling down into the United States:

• Number three for Fastest Rising Topic is the Japan earthquake.
• Number two under Science / Sustainability Category is "Sustainable Energy".
• Number nine under Science / Environment Category is "What is Carbon Footprint".
• A top ten Science Category for the United States is "Waste Disposal".
• Another top ten Science Category for the United States is "Alternative Energy".