Battlefield 3 tops list of games searches for 2011

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What were you most interested in this year? According to Google, it was Battlefield 3 that topped the list of games-related search terms on the internet for 2011, making it into the company's annual top ten of fastest rising queries for the year.

Google's annual Zeitgeist has released its annual Zeitgeist collection analyses 12 months of data collected from millions of searches carried out every day. This year it comes with some rather whizzy graphics and infograms too, as part of a new look for the Zeitgeist site.

According to Google, Rebecca Black (who she?) took the top spot for search term popularity, ahead of Jackass star Ryan Dunn (who died in a car accident in June) and Steve Jobs. Battlefield 3 came in at number five, just ahead of the iPhone 5.

Zeitgeist's ranking system is based on 'fastest growing search terms', however, rather than overall popularity, so it's hard to know exactly what to read in to them other than as a curious way of remembering the last year. It does throw up some curiousities, though. British news sites are all a flutter today with the information that we have an insatiable desire to know what exactly goes into scampi (for US and other overseas readers, you're probably better off in ignorance).

My favourite from the 'What is...' lists goes to South Africa, though, where the nation revealed itself as true philosophers. Apparenly, 'What is life' was the third most popular of such terms there, just after 'What is love'. The answer to the latter is, of course, an excellent indie game.

Google has published a chart of videogame search terms for the US, where Battlefield 3 came in a mere seventh place, behind Skyrim, Black Ops and Halo Reach.