Sign up to The Irish Times Archive (1859 - 2008)My Account »

Tue 12 Dec 2009Flu, celebrity deaths top web traffic

Ireland was preoccupied with the threat of swine flu and the death of celebrities in 2009, if search queries by Irish users on Google News are anything to go by.

The search engine’s year-end “zeitgeist” - a listing of the most popular keywords that users have searched for on the web – revealed the fastest rising search term on Google News in 2009 was, perhaps unexpectedly, swine flu.