I do love a good video montage. And Google have truly pulled it out of the bag with their review of the year video, framed with the question ‘what did the world search for in 2012?’.

Essentially it’s like a celebration of humanity – a little lower than the angels indeed – to leave us with a good feeling inside. It’s a novel way of presenting statistical information too, because rather than just give us data and lists a la Yahoo, Twitter, Facebook (they do that too – see below), Google’s video captures something of the why behind all these searches in the first place. These are all things that we’ve searched for because of what we wanted to experience and share in, what we desired to re-live and witness for ourselves. Amazing feats, genuine emotion, people no longer with us. To say we’re just bones and blood seems to fall short of what our hearts are actually made for. Enjoy:

Google have also produced a Zeitgeist 2012 site featuring a whole host of lists and stats about who’s searched for what. On one hand it does remind us how much data we feed them as we play this Internet game (apparently 1.2 trillion searches were conducted in 2012). But on the other hand it’s quite interesting to see that ‘how to crochet’ was the fourth highest trending ‘how to’ search, and that more Brits searched for Whitney Houston than Kate Middleton…

What do you think?