Last year I wrote about Google Zeitgiest from my IBM Thinkpad at LAX waiting to catch my plane to Richmond. I thought I was cool. Now I know I’m cool. But Google is not. They just lost a lot of street cred because Michael Arrington of TechCrunch wrote about this year’s Zeitgeist having truly innacurate information.

Google even apologized this morning, stating that their search results were hand selected based on rising popularity just for 2006. But here’s the problem: you shouldn’t label a top ten list as “Top Searches in 2006″ if it’s not truly the top searches in 2006. Think about how this is going to effect high school essay writers around the world - would your teacher believe you if you told them the #1 search on Google in 2006 was “bebo”? A? B? No, F! I mean WTF is bebo anyway? Did they pay Google to throw them in Zeitgeist?

This is not cool, I have always held Google with such high regard, this really does drop them a few points on my scorecard.

Must be a bad day for them… check out the other Google news blips:

http://gigaom.com/2006/12/28/mom-google-ate-my-gmail/

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/12/29/googles-orkut-down-for-13-hours/