While the year 2020 was marked by a surge in people anxiously Googling everything connected to the coronavirus, the old standards of sports and entertainment made a comeback in online searches all around the world this year.
“Squid Game,” Alec Baldwin, and the cryptocurrency Dogecoin are among Google’s most popular search terms for 2021, according to the Google.
Sports were also popular on the platform, with cricket, the NBA, and international football competitions such as Euro 2021 ranking among the top eight search terms, according to Google.
Read more: Covid brought major change in Pakistan’s Google searches
The top two trending global searches for the year were for the Men’s World Cup cricket match between Australia and India, as well as India’s match against England in the same event, possibly reflecting the expanding global influence of India’s hundreds of millions of internet users.
The T20 Cricket World Cup was also in the top ten most searched terms worldwide. The NBA was also on the global list, and it topped the trending search list in the United States. Sports topics featured for eight of the top ten global trending searches, thanks to the Euro 2021 and Copa America soccer tournaments.
In ninth place was the highly popular and incredibly violent Netflix series “Squid Game,” a South Korean-made survival game about people desperate to get out of debt.
The most frequently Googled person was American actor Alec Baldwin, who accidently killed a cinematographer on the set of a film in October with a loaded gun.
The terms Afghanistan, which the Taliban took over in August, and vaccines against Covid-19 were among the most commonly searched terms in terms of news categories.
People also looked for stock-related terms like GameStop, an electronics retailer that was the subject of frenetic buying, as well as cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Ether.
People frequently looked up Gabby Petito, a young American murdered while travelling across the country with her boyfriend, in the deceased individual’s category.
Questions about the pandemic dominated Google searches again in 2020, but this time queries about vaccines outnumbered those concerning Covid-19 tests.
