If you’re feeling extremely tired this holiday season, blame the 2020 news cycle as seen on Axios’s fourth annual Google Trends graph.
Why it matters: From a pandemic to protests in several cities and contested elections, 2020 was an unprecedented crisis after another. “We’ve never seen a year like this in the history of Google Trends,” Simon Rogers, a data editor at Google, told Axios. “These were great stories that changed the way we search”
- Due to the high volume of research interest in the general topics of “coronavirus” and “elections”, Axios left these terms out of our list.
- Instead, we chose to include more specific related topics, such as “masks”, “Anthony Fauci”, “absentee ballots” and “Joe Biden”.
Between the lines: The graph again reveals how short Americans’ attention can be, with the increase in Google searches often lasting just a week for a given topic.
By the numbers: Excluding “coronavirus” and “elections”, Kobe Bryant’s death generated the biggest increase in searches for any other single event.
- But Google’s general interest in “coronavirus” during the year has overshadowed Kobe Bryant more than 10 times, according to data from Google Trends.
- You can see the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ lives in a wide variety of Google search trends. Research on unemployment, hunger and food banks has been greater than ever, Rogers said.
- Still, the surge in “election” searches around November 3 was even greater than any single increase in interest in the coronavirus, although interest in the virus has remained high for longer.