Lady Gaga, swine flu top ’09 Google searches

If your 2009 Google expeditions took you on quests for pictures of Lady Gaga, news about Susan Boyle and swine flu, information about Twitter and Michael Jackson and a recipe for a comfort food like meatloaf or chili, join the cybercrowd.

These were among the most popular searches on Google for the year that’s rapidly drawing to a close, Google’s Marissa Mayer told TODAY’s Matt Lauer and Meredith Vieira Tuesday in New York.

Google even has a special name for this snapshot of what interests America: Google Zeitgeist, which means “spirit of the times.” By their searches, Americans show what they were interested in during the year.

Google breaks down queries into a number of categories, including fastest-rising searches in Google.com, Google News and Google Images. All three showed the continuing public fascination with social networking and celebrities in 2009.

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Mayer said that coming into the year no one would have predicted that Lady Gaga would be the fastest rising among image searches, but in retrospect, it makes perfect sense.

“People are always wondering what she looks like. She looks different all the time,” Mayer said.

Of the top five fastest-rising searches on Google.com, only Michael Jackson was an actual person, and searches for him were driven by his death. Three of the other four fastest-rising searches were for social networking sites, led by Twitter and followed by Facebook and Hi5. The fifth was Hulu, the free online video service.

When it came to news, swine flu led the fastest-rising searches, but after that it was all celebrity-driven, with Susan Boyle, the “Britain’s Got Talent” singing sensation, beating out Jon and Kate, Adam Lambert and Rihanna.

After Lady Gaga in image searches were searches for the film “New Moon,” Michael Jackson, Megan Fox and Selena Gomez.

Mayer also discussed the hottest product searches on Cyber Monday, the Internet’s answer to retail stores’ Black Friday. They were Zhu Zhu Pets, the trendy artificial hamsters, American Girl dolls and the hand-held electronics iPod Touch and Nintendo DS.

All that shopping and keeping up with the rich and famous builds up an appetite. And when people look for a recipe, they also turn to Google.

“We see a big trend toward recipes around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and this year we saw a trend toward comfort food,” Mayer said. Whether that is related to the ongoing recession or other factors was left for others to determine.

This year, it’s hard to get more comforting than the top two recipe searches: chili and meatloaf. The other top recipes were for cheesecake, banana bread and the humble pancake.