If you’re feeling very tired this holiday season, blame the non-stop news cycle of 2020, as shown in Axios’ fourth annual Google Trends chart.
Why does it matter: From a pandemic to protests in several cities to contested elections, 2020 has been an unprecedented crisis after another. “I’ve never seen a year like this in the history of Google Trends,” Simon Rogers, a Google data editor, told Axios. “There have been huge stories that have changed the way we look.”
- Due to the overwhelming volume of search interest for the broad topics of “coronavirus” and “elections,” Axios left these terms on our list.
- Instead, we chose to include more specific topics, such as “masks,” “Anthony Fauci,” “absentee ballots,” and “Joe Biden.”
Between the lines: The graph shows again how short American attention can be, with increases in Google searches that often only last a week for a particular topic.
By numbers: With the exception of the “coronavirus” and “” elections, Kobe Bryant’s death generated the largest increase in searches for any other event.
- But overall, Google’s interest in “coronavirus” has overshadowed Kobe Bryant more than 10 times a year, according to Google Trends.
- You can see the impact of COVID-19 on the lives of Americans in a wide variety of Google search trends. Searches for unemployment, famine and food banks have been bigger than ever, Rogers said.
- Even so, the increase in the search for “elections” around November 3 was even greater than any increase in interest in coronavirus, although interest in the virus remained high for a long time.