If you’re feeling very tired this holiday season, blame the non-stop news cycle of 2020, as shown in Axios ’fourth annual Google Trends chart.
Why it’s important: From a pandemic to protests in several cities to contested elections, 2020 has been one unprecedented crisis after another. “We’ve never seen a year like this in the history of Google Trends,” Simon Rogers, a Google data editor, told Axios. “They were huge stories that changed the way we search.”
- Due to the overwhelming volume of search interest in the big issues of “coronavirus” and “elections,” Axios left these terms off our list.
- Instead, we chose to include more specific related topics, such as “masks,” “Anthony Fauci,” “absentee voting,” and “Joe Biden.”
Between lines: The chart again reveals the short attention span of Americans, with Google search uploads usually lasting only a week for a given topic.
By numbers: Excluding the “coronavirus” and the “elections”, Kobe Bryant’s death generated the biggest rise in searches of any other event.
- But Google’s general interest in the “coronavirus” during the year overshadowed Kobe Bryant more than 10 times, according to Google Trends data.
- You can see the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of Americans on a wide variety of Google search trends. Searches on unemployment, hunger and food banks were higher than ever, Rogers said.
- However, the rise in election searches around November 3 was even higher than that of any interest in the coronavirus, although interest in the virus remained high for longer.