Big brother or not Google knows a lot of stuff about what people are doing on the web. What they search for, where they go after the search and where they go after that. Google definitely will provide a cultural snapshot of the late 90’s and beyond. You’ve only got to look at the top search terms for any given month to get an idea of what is in people’s heads. And it’s not the same as what the newspapers were printing. Who would have thought that ‘terrorism’ would not have been the top search term in the year of the 9/11 attacks?
What is more concerning for me is how how ‘McFly’ figure in the zeitgeist for the UK! Nooooo!!!!