In a year like 2020, most people wanted to learn more about coronavirus, check on actor Tom Hanks, follow race car driver Ryan Newman, get the latest on Joe Biden, play “Among Us,” learn the lyrics to “WAP,” watch “Parasite” or “Tiger King” and make dalgona bread. That’s what Google is telling us from the search engine’s 2020 Year in Search worldwide summary.
The aforementioned topics were top searches in categories, but the overall top-five Google searches were for coronavirus, election results, Kobe Bryant, Zoom and IPL (Indian Premier League for professional cricket).
Hanks was the most popular actor search because he announced that he contracted the coronavirus in March, the onset of the pandemic. Newman topped athletes, also out of apparent concern for his horrific Daytona 500 crash.
Compassion continued with top-five loss searches for Kobe Bryant, Naya Rivera, Chadwick Boseman, Sushant Singh Rupant and George Floyd, and how-to-help searches about the Black Lives Matter movement, blood donations, panic attacks, Yemen and Beirut.
Google experienced a sustained high spike of searches in 2020, when “coronavirus,” “coronavirus update” and “coronavirus symptoms” occupied three of the spots on the top-10 list for searches. That led to related trending searches for “drive-in movie theater near me,” “how to make hand sanitizer” and “how to cut men’s hair.”
In a powerful video accompanying the lists, Google revealed that “why” was part of searches more than ever. “Why is toilet paper sold out?” Right?!
“So until we get to every answer, we’re still searching,” the narrator said. Are we ever. And 2020 ain’t done yet.
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