Current Google insight trends: John Lennon, NHL

(AFP PHOTO)

Following what would have been the former Beatle's 70th birthday, searches for John Lennon saw a large increase this week. However, the Chinese expression " ???" was the search term that showed the most growth worldwide.

???, which roughly translates in English to "Satsuki" (??) "month" (?), refers to the hot debate amongst Chinese internet users following the publication of a controversial blog post regarding the Chinese National Day on October 10.

Saturday, October 9 marked what would have been John Lennon's 70th birthday. Though the singer-songwriter was undoubtedly a popular search item in his own right, it is likely some of these results can be attributed to Google's John Lennon doodle. Over the weekend users of the search engine found that the regular Google logo had been altered to include a sketch of John Lennon; when users clicked on the drawing a video featuring "Imagine," one of his most famous songs, was played and the search engine automatically generated search results for "John Lennon."

This year's Commonwealth Games, abbreviated by internet users to "cwg 2010," was also a popular search term over the last seven days. Recently it has emerged that the winner of the women's 100 meters, Oludamola Osayomi, failed a doping test.

The National Hockey League (NHL) experienced a large increase in searches following the opening weekend of the season on October 10, and Brazilian meteorological site "clima tempo" also saw a increase in searches.

The search terms with the most significant growth worldwide in the last seven days as measured by Google Insights, recorded on October 11 at 8:30 AM GMT, are:

1.      ??? (+1,900%)
2.      John Lennon (+850%)
3.      cwg 2010 (+300%)
4.      cricinfo (+110%)
5.      clima tempo (+40%)
6.      nhl (+40%)