Google’s Year in Search 2020

Every year, I like to share Google’s “year in search”, both the year’s video (above) and some of the “top five” searches globally, in the USA, and in New Zealand. I think it’s important to have a record of what was on our collective minds during a year, and posts like this make it easier to refer back to later. I think those sorts of things are useful, too.

In the following lists, clicking on the section headline will take you to the Google page for the “Year in Search” results. From there, it’s easy to change the view by country.

So, here’s what was trending in 2020:

Global

Top 5 overall searches in the world: 1 Coronavirus, 2 Election results, 3 Kobe Bryant, 4 Zoom, 5 IPL. Top 5 news searches in the world: 1 Coronavirus, 2 Election results, 3 Iran, 4 Beirut, 5 Hantavirus.

United States

Top 5 overall searches in the USA: 1 Election results, 2 Coronavirus, 3 Kobe Bryant, 4 Coronavirus update, 5 Coronavirus symptoms. Top 5 news searches in the USA: 1 Election results, 2 Coronavirus, 3 Stimulus checks, 4 Unemployment, 5 Iran.

New Zealand

Top 5 overall searches in New Zealand: 1 Coronavirus, 2 US Election Results, 3 Zoom, 4 Seesaw, 5 Kobe Bryant. Top 5 news searches in New Zealand: 1 Coronavirus, 2 US election results, 3 Australia fires, 4 Election results NZ, 5 NZX50.

I said something in last year’s post that turned out to be true: “2020 is an election year in New Zealand and the USA, so I expect to see terms relating to politics on the lists for the two countries.” That was obviously going to be true, but the next sentence, “And plenty that aren’t,” turned out to include one of the biggest things in our lifetimes, the one event that dominated the year for the entire planet (and its searches): The global pandemic. Which goes to show, I guess, that at the end of one year we can never guess what we’ll be searching for in the next.

Here’s hoping the searches in 2021 are boring!

Related: In October, Google also posted an hour-long video, “Trillions of Questions, No Easy Answers: A (home) movie about how Google Search works”.