EA' Battlefield 3 was one of 2011's top-rising Google searches globally, but failed to best Activision's "Black Ops" in U.S. video game searches
By Kyle Orland
Google's annual "Zeitgeist" list of the most popular search terms for 2011 shows first-person shooters dominating video-game-focused searches while "Angry Birds" shows its wider cultural impact in some unexpected categories.
Electronic Arts' massive marketing push for war-themed shooter "Battlefield 3" seems to have paid off, making the game the fifth fastest-rising search term worldwide this year. Google's data shows search interest in the game peaked around its October release, unsurprisingly, and found that "Battlefield 3" searchers in Norway actually outpaced those in the U.S., on a relative basis.
The quick rise of "Battlefield 3" searches wasn't enough to push it to the top of the year's top video game searches in the U.S., however. Holiday 2010 best-seller "Black Ops"?topped the category, with related term "Call of Duty" coming close behind in second. Microsoft's first-person shooter series "Halo" came in third, well ahead of "Battlefield 3" which languished in seventh place.
Long-running franchises "Super Mario" and "Mortal Kombat" appeared in fourth and fifth in the Video Games category, thanks to major new releases during the year, while newly released RPG release "Skyrim" showed up in sixth thanks to heavy searching in November. Upcoming titles "Diablo 3" and "Mass Effect 3" were the ninth and tenth most popular searches, respectively, showing strong interest in these upcoming sequels.
While Rovio's mega-popular "Angry Birds" wasn't a top Video Game search, it did show up as the number one fastest rising costume search in the U.S., peaking around Halloween time. "Angry Birds Plush" and "Angry Birds" also appeared as the seventh and eighth fastest rising U.S. toy searches for the year, helping to show the property's popularity outside the gaming realm.
Interestingly, the ninth fastest-growing toy search for the year was "LEGO Black Ops," which doesn't exist as either a toy line or a video game but does exist as a rather popular series of YouTube videos.
Finally, with Sony launching its portable Vita system in Japan this weekend, the company might be heartened to know the system was the ninth fastest-rising global consumer electronics search for the year, though only under its original "Sony NGP" (for "Next Generation Portable") codename.
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Kyle Orland has written hundreds of thousands of words about gaming since he started a Mario fan site at the age of 14. You can follow him on?Twitter?or at his personal website,?KyleOrland.com.
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