We revisit search spikes from five years ago—not necessarily the top searches— but a sampling of queries that suggest a few of the countless stories and questions that reverberated throughout our world, online and offline, on September 11, 2001.

We saw stories unfolding in particular questions:

• "What's my blood type"? ("blood donations," "give blood")
• "Who would be president if..."? ("speaker of the house")
• "What are the world's tallest buildings"? ("petronas towers," "empire state building," "skyscrapers")
• "Did anybody predict the attacks"? ("nostradamus," "tom clancy," "bible code")
• "Who was behind the attacks"? ("osama bin laden," "mabus," "antichrist," "fbi most wanted," "taliban," "hezbollah")
• "Is this the beginning of world war iii"? ("declaration of war," "draft registration")
• "Is this the end of the world"? ("book of revelations," "end times," "armageddon," "apocalypse")

We saw searches that attempted to name the events before a name was coined. Some echoed headlines from news networks: "attack on america," "america under attack," and "day of terror." Some invoked the crash sites themselves: "pentagon bombing" and "world trade disaster." And there were the queries that simply spoke of the date: "9/11," "911," "september 11," and "september 11 in history."

History did come to mind, with people remembering deadly attacks and wondering where this new attack fit in. Searches on "pearl harbor," "hiroshima," "oklahoma city bombing," "world trade center bombing," and "uss cole" popped up. A spike on "antietam" stands out and that battle still holds the terrible distinction of being the bloodiest day in U.S. history.

The word "live" showed up repeatedly, along with the immediate needs behind it. Queries on "live news," "live radio," "breaking news," "latest news," "instant news," and "live coverage" were the rule of the day. People also sought out "police scanners," "air traffic control," "shortwave radio," and "satellite images." They also wanted live views of New York as witnessed by the demand for "world trade center live cam" and "webcams new york." And it's heart stopping to see the queries on "flight tracking," "flight paths," and "flight status" as we reflect on the intense early hours before all flights were grounded and before we knew how many planes had been hijacked.

In his poem "The Diameter of the Bomb," Yehuda Amichai traces the ultimately endless effects of a single bomb blast, limited in its physical range and its number of casualties, but extending finally to include "the whole world in [its] circle." The list of search spikes from that Tuesday alone is literally thousands of queries long, with some searches repeated hundreds of times, some hundreds of thousands. Each search suggests another circle, another individual whose life has been altered by these terrorist attacks: "noticias en espanol," "chinese news," "arabic news," "mta nyc," "amtrak," "school closings," "stuyvesant high school," "world trade center companies," "windows on the world," "cantor fitzgerald," "prayer," "rosary," "war quotes," "bible quotes," "defcon," "fema," and "Allah." The list of searches, though gigantic, is finite—the effects of the 9/11 attacks are endless and ongoing.