As the year is coming to an end, Google once again decided to inform us about the most popular Google Search trends in 2016. Now, the way Google classifies these annual search trends isn’t by their overall popularity, but by the volume of change in comparison to the year before. In other words, the queries listed below weren’t the most popular ones in 2016 but the ones that experienced the biggest surge in popularity over the course of the year.
With that in mind, the most popular Google Search query in 2016 was Powerball, the well-known lottery game offered by most states in the US which recently broke the record for the biggest jackpot in the world at $1.56 billion. Prince, the famous musician who tragically passed away in April came second, while Hurricane Matthew was the third top trending term on Google Search over the course of the year. At fourth place came Pokemon GO, Niantic Labs’ hit augmented reality mobile game which started rolling out worldwide back in July and quickly took over the world, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in the process. The term “io” concludes this year’s top five trending search queries. The rest of the list includes the Olympics, another recently passed musician David Bowie, and three queries related to politics. Not surprisingly, the latter consist of the terms “Trump,” “Election,” and “Hillary Clinton,” i.e. queries pertaining to the recently finished US presidential election.
Overall, these top trending Google Search terms do a relatively good job of summarizing 2016. This year has been a rollercoaster of emotions ranging from terrible natural disasters with tragic consequences and deaths of celebrities to unexpected mobile hits and even more surprising political outcomes. So, here’s to hoping that 2017 will only surprise us in pleasant ways. If you’re interested in checking out the top trending Google Search queries in 2016 by country, or you want to delve deeper into Google’s latest set of data, you can do so by following the source link below. The said link will redirect you to a localized page on which you can filter through Google Search queries by country and period. Select countries can even be browsed by category, and all of the information on the page is accompanied by automatically generated graphs and other useful illustrations.