December is the end-of-the-year lists and the most popular is the annual Zeitgeist list from Google which list the fastest rising and most popular terms.
In a General Election year for the U.K., terms around the national vote (“register to vote”, “Cameron”, and “labour party”) unsurprisingly came to the forefront of the news category, but the usual suspects (“Justin Bieber” and “World Cup”, for instance) still dominated the most popular searches in 2010.