Year-End Zeitgeist 2013 - Nelson Mandela, Paul Walker and iPhone 5s top Google Trends

Google has unveiled the results of Year-End Zeitgeist 2013, which illustrates the people, places, events and activities that captured the world's attention. Only a few have made to Google's trending list in its 13th edition of "the spirit of the times". Nelson Mandela, Paul Walker and iPhone 5s emerged as Top 3 global searches.

2013 Google Zeitgeist has presented more than 1000 top-ten lists from 72 countries with categories like Top Trending Searches, Trending People, Most Searched Events, Consumer Electronics and more. In something unique for this year, the Search Giant has combined its Zeitgeist with Google Trends. The late Cory Monteith, and the Harlem Shake rounded up the top five Trending Searches worldwide of 2013. The findings were revealed in a 2013 Zeitgeist post on Official Google Blog by Amit Singhal (+Amit Singhal), Senior Vice President and Google Fellow on 17 December 2013.



Google has made an interactive data visualization based 3D global map, displaying the top search trends of 2013 by day in cities worldwide, to enable people to parse through any major everyday popular searches. Users can readily rotate the globe, select a city and discover the subjects that made people to search on any day of the year, from international news to local sports. People take an international trip of the greatest instances from the last 12 months in their Year in Review video of 2013.

KnowEm: Social Media Identity Protection & Online Brand Management

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KnowEm was designed to help individuals, businesses and Fortune 500 companies to find out whether their names, brands, or copyrighted properties are available or taken on Social Networks. It also guides about how to make contact with each website in order to have the stolen user name released and handed over to the right person or enterprise. Since the start of operation, it has aided people or corporations to book over 600,000 profiles and reported their customers over 50,000 problems of squatting and misrepresentation of a brand, username or trademarked terms.

KnowEm currently tracks over 550 popular Social properties. Websites categories include Blogging, Bookmarking, Business, Community, Design, Entertainment, Health, Information, Micro-blogging, Music, News, Photo, Tech, Travel and Video. See the complete online websites list here. It offers the facilities of User Name Check, Social Profile Check, Domain Name Check and Trademark Availability Check.

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Facebook updated News Feed Algorithm to display more High Quality Content like News Articles

Facebook has updated the News Feed algorithm to include links to more "high-quality" content like news articles in place of meme photos that redirect users to different sites. The move is to provide more relevant information to its users. Social Networking leader carried out intensive research before incorporating more "high-quality" articles into the News Feed area instead of latest memes. With this integration, users will more frequently see links to articles about current events, sports or politics.

Facebook engineering manager Varun Kacholia and software engineer Minwen Ji wrote in a post on the company's Newsroom on Monday, 2 December 2013:

We've noticed that people enjoy seeing articles on Facebook, and so we're now paying closer attention to what makes for high quality content, and how often articles are clicked on from News Feed on mobile.

The change will particularly be visible on mbile phones, as the company brings trending news on the go. This will easily provide users the knowledge of what's going on around the world and in their friends circle. Decision to reduce memes shouldn't have significant effect on users, as most people show interest in news articles over photos.

Facebook is also driving user engagement as the new algorithm change will sometimes bring few stories on top of the News Feed section, whenever new comments are added. This allows the users to keep the conversation going on.