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“So, basically, when Google released their Year in Search list, all the data was publicly available for download from their lists. It provides the top 10 search terms generally, regardless of category. Then it also has the top 10 terms for categories such as news, people, actors, TV shows, concerts etc,” Reddit user Roshaan Khan compiled a concise chronological online search chart based on Google Trends

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So, the graph is set up in chronological order, listing search terms from top to bottom, sorted by month from left to right. The year started off with a spike in Kobe Bryant searches, following his tragic death, then moving on to India VS New Zealand, who were competing in the World Test Cricket Championship, and finally Harvey Weinstein, who was convicted of sexual assault charges in late February. March came around and so did the coronavirus. The pandemic started sweeping the world and so search terms like coronavirus, coronavirus symptoms, coronavirus update, and death started trending. Then there was also the hantavirus scare, but it left as fast as it came around.

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Now, the pandemic as a conceptual set of keywords left the top search spots, but it was everything else that was related to it that followed: Google Classroom and Zoom for distant teaching and meeting, worries about unemployment, the stimulus check, and, of course, masks. This was also around the time the world had gotten used to the pandemic and moved on to other things, starting with George Floyd and the BLM movement. If things weren’t bad enough, the Beirut explosion also happened soon after, sending a shockwave of reaction throughout the entire world

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Now, these are just a few keywords that were trending, but Google has also provided top 10 lists of a handful of search categories, two of which, general searches and news, were dominated by coronavirus. Tom Hanks was top searched actor, Ryan Newman was top searched athlete, Parasite was top searched movie, Among Us was top searched game, Tiger King was top searched TV show, and Joe Biden was top searched person. Following the pandemic, there were also related entries like Zoom, unemployment, masks, and stimulus checks

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And these are besides all of the other significant events of the year that apparently didn’t make it into any list, like the Australian wildfires, Hong Kong protests, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s announcement that they are stepping down, murder hornets, and many more. “The data is for the top search terms, news terms and people terms for the whole world. Many people kept asking about certain events such as wildfires, Bitcoin and PS5. But what they didn’t know is that Google makes one list for global data and then separate, individual lists for country data. So, the wildfires were definitely trending in Australia on a country, but not a global level. Same goes for PS5, it was only in the US, not in the world.

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most of the subsequent searches after COVID, such as zoom, classroom, unemployment, vaccine, mask etc, occurred due to COVID, even stimulus checks. So those Redditors should understand that asking about this correlation is similar to, but not exactly the same, as asking if hunger and food are correlated. Plus correlation is not causation, so even finding a correlation wouldn’t tell much beyond confirming what we have expected.”

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