Brits and Kiwis got curious about the Large Hadron Collider this year, according to newly released search stats from Google. But nobody else did.

After a press–sweeping September debut – and an almost immediate breakdown from which rumours are still rippling – “large hadron collider” was the 6th-fastest-rising search term of 2008 in the UK, and came in 10th in New Zealand (fastest rising = largest increase in searches since 2007). It didn’t make the top 10 list in any other country.

The LHC-equivalent 6th fastest riser for the US was “fox news”; for Canada it was “free movies”.

No other science term made it onto the lists – unless you count “earth day”, which was 4th for Hong Kong googlers (followed, for reasons opaque to me, by “alexander graham bell”, “marc chagall”, and “diego velasquez”). In Australia “underbelly” was 10th, but disappointingly, it’s a popular TV show, not an epidemic of seedy corruption.