If you feel extra tired this season, blame the relentless news cycle of 2020, as suggested in Axios’ fourth annual Google Trends chart.
Why it matters: From a pandemic to protests in multiple cities to disputed elections, 2020 was one unprecedented crisis after another. “We’ve never seen such a year in Google Trends history,” Simon Rogers, a data editor at Google, told Axios. “It was big stories that changed the way we look.”
- Due to the overwhelming amount of interest in the search for the broad topics of ‘coronavirus’ and ‘elections’, Axios left these terms off our list.
- We chose to include more specific, related topics like ‘masks’, ‘Anthony Fauci’, ‘absentee moods’ and ‘Joe Biden’.
Between the lines: The graph again shows how short the attention of Americans can be, with increases in Google searches often lasting just a week for a given topic.
By the numbers: With the exception of ‘coronavirus’ and ” elections, Kobe Bryant’s death has yielded the largest increase in searches for any other single event.
- But Google’s general interest in ‘coronavirus’ has overshadowed Kobe Bryant more than ten times over the year, according to Google Trends data.
- You can see the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of Americans in a wide variety of Google search trends. Investigations into unemployment, hunger and food banks were higher than ever before, Rogers said.
- Nevertheless, the increase in the search for ‘elections’ around 3 November was even higher than any single interest in the coronavirus, although interest in the virus remained longer.