2020 HAS been a year like no other, and our Google search trends perfectly reflect the madness of the past 12 months.
Global data released by the search giant reveals that “death” and “TikTok” were among the most popular terms looked up by netizens this year.
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The data was last week compiled into a handy infographic by Reddit user Roshaan Khan.
As the world was ravaged by the Covid-19 pandemic, “coronavirus”, “vaccine”, “mask” and “unemployment” emerged as popular terms this year.
And in response to our work and social lives going digital during national lockdowns, video chat app Zoom amassed huge search interest.
The world wasn’t only hunting for Covid-19-related news, however.
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November’s US Presidential Election garnered plenty of attention, with candidates Joe Biden and Donald Trump both topping Google’s charts.
The tragic death of basketball legend Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash in January also captured the attention of the world.
Google releases its annual Year in Search trends in December, offering an insight into what the world wanted to know during the previous 12 months.
To create his infographic, Roshaan downloaded Google’s data dump and organised it using special visualisation software.
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Roshaan said he focussed his graphic on the top 10 general search terms as well as the top terms for news events and people.
“I wanted this visualisation to not only reflect the top terms but also represent the year 2020,” he told BoredPanda.
“These three categories can act as the pulse of culture.”
Of all the search terms featured in his graphic, “death” and “TikTok” were the most consistently popular throughout the year.
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TikTok teetered on the verge of a ban in the US for much of 2020, while more than 1.7million people worldwide have died of Covid-19 this year.
Couple those with TikTok’s skyrocketing popularity and a string of high-profile celebrity deaths, and it’s no surprise these terms topped the charts.
Roshaan, who is based in India, added that he hoped his graphic had “captured the events that defined the year.”
In a blog post announcing its Year in Search trends, Google highlighted the coronavirus pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement as the year’s most significant search terms.
TikTok: Brief guide to the world’s most downloaded app
- TikTok lets users create and share short videos with music and camera effects
- The hit app is best known for short dance videos, lip-syncing clips, comedy sketches, and talent footage
- It is owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, founded by the entrepreneur Zhang Yiming
- The $200billion conglomerate acquired the Musical.ly app in 2017 and merged it with TikTok, bringing millions of new users
- By February 2019, TikTok and Douyin had been downloaded more than a billion times
- It was the most-downloaded app on the App Store in 2018 and 2019
- Cyber experts have expressed concern over ByteDance’s alleged links to the Chinese government
- The Department of Defense has urged its employees to avoid using the app over national security concerns
- TikTok says it does not and would not share user data with the Chinese government
The search giant described 2020 as “the year the world asked ‘why?'”
“While ‘coronavirus’ was the top trending search worldwide, we also asked questions like ‘why is it called covid-19?’ and ‘why is mental health important?’ more than ever before,” the search giant wrote.
“We searched for ways to help each other, like looking at how to support essential workers on the front lines of COVID-19 or how to aid people affected by the wildfires in Australia or devastation in Beirut.
“Looking ahead to 2021, there’s one thing we know for sure: We’ll keep searching.”
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In other news, Google services went offline in a major global outage earlier this month.
The search giant can now identify a song that’s stuck in your head by analysing your hum or whistle.
And, Snapchat will finally let users add music to their snaps in a move that will see it rival TikTok and Instagram Reels.
What do you think of this year’s Google trends? Let us know in the comments!
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This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
