Google's Year In Search

While 2021 already feels like a long year – taking a look at the search trends from 2020 reminds us how much we can pack into a year.

Google tracks the terms people search for using its platform.  Over time, the data about what people search for (and how many people are searching for it, and how long that topic stays relatively interesting to them) is interesting in and of itself.

An infographic like this is interesting and valuable as a normalized contextual map of the "shock" and "awe" ripples felt by humans as a result of events (real or imagined) that happened around them.  

It's worth noting that each graph is on a 100% scale, so "Death" having no drop off means it had a relatively consistent search history throughout the year. 

The visualization is in chronological order to help highlight major events as they happened in 2020 (which is different than presenting the most searched terms in rank order). 

 

via Roshaan Khan

The only constants were death, Tesla, and TikTok ... sounds about right. 

It might be interesting to see a similar graph of the relative air-time given to topics on various news sources (e.gl, Fox News, MSNBC, Breitbart, NYTimes, WSJ, Washington Post, etc.).  The comparison of the word cloud, the intensity, the frequency, and the duration of the coverage would be interesting as well.  So would a comparison of your social media news feed to your choice of news source.

On a different note, as I think back on last year, what's really crazy about this list is how many major events didn't make it (for example,  the wildfires, the Hong Kong protests, murder hornets, nuclear threats, cyber-attacks, Zoom, market crashes, etc.).

The data is also somewhat biased.  While this is a global list, it's clearly dominated by India and the USA. That has a lot to do with the tech stack populations are allowed to use.  Remember that countries like China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea prevent their citizens from using the same "Internet" that we use and "encourage" them to use approved tools to surf, chat, or search. As such, their searches didn't impact Google's findings fully.

you want to see more about this, Google put together a video and a more comprehensive list. 

Best wishes for a great 2021.

Onwards!