Thanks to the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano last spring, Iceland has managed to be a part of the top five most searched trends on Google for 2010.

Google has recently released Zeitgeist 2010, a comprehensive overview of how and what people have searched on their site this past year. The top five global events, in terms of number of people searching those terms, were the World Cup, the Olympics, the earthquake in Haiti, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the ash cloud produced by the Eyjafjallajökull eruption.

The data shows that while many of the searches were being conducted in Iceland itself, the highest concentration of hits was within continental Europe. In fact, for a single country, Ireland searched "ash cloud iceland" far more than any other.

Which would make sense, seeing how the ash cloud paralysed air traffic across the continent, cancelling thousands of flight at costs that reach into billions of Euros.