Google is the largest search engine in the world, which means people use it a lot to search for stuff, and the words people look for can give us information on what is trending and what is important to the world. Every year Google releases its “A Year In Search” report, highlighting everything of importance that happened, and this year’s report has just been published. 2015 was a very important year for social causes, and several events that shocked us also made everyone more aware. The most searched subject was the terror attacks in Paris, with 897 million queries, labeled “terror in the heart of Europe”.
The 87th Academy Awards made people search a lot too, raking in 406 million queries. World sports events also got big slices of the attention, with the Cricket World Cup getting more than 320 million queries, and Rugby World Cup coming next with almost 250 million searches. FIFA in crisis also attracted the attention of the internet with 42 million queries, and Women’s World Cup saw 113 million searches. Star Wars was also a big subject with more than 155 million queries and counting, as the release of the movie approaches. Famous people that left us were also present with 123 million searches on Leonard Nimoy, Oliver Sacks, Dave Goldberg, and much more. “The dress” got its one week of fame and more than 70 million people wanted to know if it was “white and gold”, “black and blue” or “blue and brown”. Other important searches were the Nepal earthquake, the Migrant Crisis in Europe, the death of Cecil the Lion, the Iran Nuclear Deal, China & Greece crisis, and the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
Each topic has its own set of information that shows in which countries they were more important, a timeline of search volume, related searches, cities where people searched the most, and a ton of specific information. There are several lists from all sorts of topics, ranging from TV shows to “what is” to most searched memes and GIFs. Google also released a nice video to highlight the most important searches in 2015, “inspired by trillions of searches”, and you can watch it below. If you are curious to explore what the world searched this year, just head out to the source link and rejoice.