The annual Google Year in Search gives us an indication of our search habits over the course of 12 months, with 2018 being the year of the World Cup in our search bars.
Google has encapsulated the entire ‘Year in Search’, as usual, with a fantastic recap video that showcases many of the people who were the subject of our searches.
We saw a number of major elections globally with the top search “how to” question being “how to register to vote”. Simon Rogers, Data Editor for Google News Lab summarized the entire year, explaining that we all searched for “good” more than ever before.
As each year closes, Google Trends data reflects not only these everyday queries, but also the moments, people, ideas, and questions that made that trip around the sun so unique. During a year of highs and lows, the Year in Search highlights all the ways people continued to search for “good”—and this year, it was more than ever.
The World Cup dominated searches both globally and nationally, but the video makes acknowledgements to those who passed away too. This saw a spike in searches for “how to be a good role model”, whilst the news of the soccer team trapped in a cave in Thailand inspired searches for “scuba diving lessons near me” by over 100% in the wake of this news breaking.
Google’s Year in Search 2018 site not only ranks our searches globally, it even allows for country-by-country search breakdowns. Beyond that, there are individual search categories that includes News, People, Actors, Athletes, Movies and TV Shows.
Our global searches were unfortunately littered with those that we lost throughout the year, including Swedish DJ Avicii and Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee. The top searches globally are below:
- World Cup
- Avicii
- Mac Miller
- Stan Lee
- Black Panther
- Meghan Markle
- Anthony Bourdain
- XXXTentacion
- Stephen Hawking
- Kate Spade
Read more on Google:
- Sundar Pichai suggests other non-Search areas Google could explore in China, like healthcare
- Numbers from Pichai’s testimony: up to 100+ Googlers on Dragonfly, 160M used Privacy Checkup
- Sundar Pichai highlights Google’s ‘American roots,’ privacy, & lack of bias in Congressional testimony
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