Janet, Katrina Most Googled in 2005

With 2005 almost over, it's time for the yearly Google Zeitgeist, a look at what users of the popular search engine were most commonly searching for during the past 365 days. Heading this year's list were pop star Janet Jackson and Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in August.

"We chose a few key events and phenoms to study, and predictably found the patterns to be amusing or bemusing, challenging or heartening -- kind of like the year itself," Google Zeitgeist team member Karen Wickre explained.

The term "zeitgeist" is German in origin, and means "the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era," according to Webster's Dictionary.

This year's findings include:

- Popular social networking site MySpace was the biggest gainer in searches during 2005, with searches for Ares, a new peer-to-peer file sharing application coming in second;

- The iPod remained the top searched consumer electronic for the second year in a row;

- Searches for Wikipedia skyrocketed during the second half of the year;

- People seemed generally more interested in searching for Britney than they did Mariah Carey or Shakira;

- Searches for Martha Stewart have outpaced those for Donald Trump since the premeire of The Apprentice: Martha Stewart;

- People search for pages on the traditional flu much more often than the Bird-avian flu variety, even when hype surrounding the virus was at its highest this fall;

- When news breaks the world turns to the BBC, not CNN.

"It turns out that looking at the aggregation of billions of search queries people type into Google reveals something about our curiosity, our thirst for news, and perhaps even our desires," Google wrote.

The full 2005 Zeitgeist can be found on the Google Web site.