If you’re feeling extra tired this holiday season, blame the 2020 nonstop news cycle, as shown in Axios’ fourth annual Google Trends chart.
Why it matters: From a pandemic to multi-city protests to disputed elections, 2020 was one unprecedented crisis after another. “We’ve never seen a year like this in Google Trends history,” Simon Rogers, a Google data editor, told Axios. “These were huge stories that changed the way we search.”
- Due to the overwhelming amount of search interest in the broad topics “coronavirus” and “elections”, Axios has dropped those terms from our list.
- We chose to include more specific, related topics such as ‘masks’, ‘Anthony Fauci’, ‘absentee ballots’ and ‘Joe Biden’.
Between the lines: The graph again shows just how short Americans’ attention spans can be, with spikes in Google searches often lasting as little as a week for a given topic.
In numbers: With the exception of “coronavirus” and “” elections, “Kobe Bryant’s death caused the largest spike in searches for any other event.
- But according to data from Google Trends, Google’s general interest in the “coronavirus” overshadowed Kobe Bryant more than 10 times during the year.
- You can see the impact of COVID-19 on Americans’ lives across a wide variety of Google search trends. Searches for unemployment, hunger, and food banks were higher than ever before, Rogers said.
- Still, the spike in searches for “elections” around November 3 was even higher than any interest in the coronavirus, although interest in the virus remained high for longer.