Nairobi — Internet search giant, Google, has published its 2009 Zeitgeist, a list of the most popular topics online.

Kenyans priorities are on jobs, news, finances and the government when it came to local searches, it suggests.

The most searched Kenyan items were: Jobs Kenya; Kenya Airways; Nation Kenya; Public Service Commission; Kenya Revenue Authority; Kenya Law; Kenya News; Nation Newspaper Kenya; Orange Kenya; and Central Bank of Kenya.

But it's not all jobs and Daily Nation, the country's growing interest in social networking and online sharing platforms was prominent with sites such as Facebook, YouTube, and Wikipedia among the most popular general searches.

On news specific searches, Kenya was the top searched item while Somalia was seventh. Sports took four of the remaining eight spots with Arsenal, Manchester, Premier League and Chelsea taking the second, fifth, eight and tenth spots, respectively.

Kenya's favourite son, Obama, was the third most popular news search with Facebook, KCSE and Michael Jackson taking the remaining spots.

The death of Michael Jackson earlier this year made him the most searched for celebrity with Rihanna and Michelle Obama rounding out the top three celebrity searches. Bob Marley was tenth.

Sports specific searches confirmed that not a single aspect of African football cracked the list.

Of the ten most popular sports searches, the top six were related to European football. They were, in order: Arsenal News; Chelsea; Champions League Results; Manchester United News; Real Madrid; and Liverpool FC.

The remaining four spots were filled out by: cheetah-adopting, world record breaking Usain Bolt; followed by Cristiano Ronaldo; Roger Federer; and simply "Football."

The information was compiled by Google using information from multiple sources including Google Trends, Insights for Search and their own internal data analysis.