California-based tech giant Google today released a roundup of the most frequently asked queries of 2023 in its regular “Year in Search” feature, highlighting memorable pop culture moments, the loss of beloved celebrities and tragic news with worldwide ramifications.
In the news domain, at the top of the list was the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, according to global data from Google, followed by queries related to the small submarine tour of the Titanic that broke up in June, as well as the devastating earthquakes in Syria and Turkey in February.
The person most asked about on Google this year was Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin, who suffered a heart attack on the field during a game in January but has since returned to NFL games with much fanfare.
Next up is actor Jeremy Renner who survived a serious accident with a snowplow in early 2023. The late actor Matthew Perry and singer Tina Turner lead the searches for dead celebrities.
In the field of entertainment, the movie “Barbie” dominates searches on Google from the world of movies this year, followed by “Oppenheimer” and the Indian thriller Jawan. The simultaneous release of the films “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” in theaters in July generated so much interest that it created a cultural phenomenon called “Barbieheimer” by combining the names of the two films.
On television, “The Last of US,” “Wedneseday” and “Ginnie and Georgia” are the top three shows Google users were interested in in 2023.
For music, the main search was for the song “Idol” by Joasobi. This was followed by Jason Aldina’s “Try That in A Small Town,” which soared on the charts after controversy this summer, and then “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” by Shakira and Bizarap.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of Google’s top search trends. Inter Miami, the new home of Argentine superstar Lionel Messi, topped Google’s sports team trends.
And especially in the USA, many users spent the year 2023 asking why eggs, Taylor Swift concert tickets and Sriracca sauce bottles are so expensive. The word “rizz”, which was recently named Oxford’s word of the year, leads among queries for the definition of the slang word.
Google announced that it collected its search data for the year 2023 from January 1 to November 27 of this year.
Google isn’t alone in releasing annual data as 2023 draws to a close. Last week, for example, Wikipedia online encyclopedia, published a list of the most visited articles this year, as well as the number of total views, in which Chat GPT leads.
To mark its 25th birthday, Google also released data on the most popular views of “all time” by various categories. Since 2004, when the company’s trending data first became available globally, the most searched Grammy winner of all time was for Beyonce, while Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo had the most views among athletes and the most searched movie was Harry Potter.
