Google has released its annual list of trending searches for the year, and it’s perhaps no surprise that ‘coronavirus’ was a popular topic, with no less than three of the five overall top searches.
Prefacing its latest report, Google said that 2020 was the year when everyone asked “why”.
This short three-letter word was used in queries more than ever before as searchers looked for relevant content about a range of different topics.
While Google did not break down trends month by month, there is likely to have been a huge change in search behaviour from March onward.
Many of the searches that feature in the trending list are related to the coronavirus and reflect how people tried to adapt to the ‘new normal’ for work and home life.
However, in the US at least, coronavirus was not the top search overall as that honour went to ‘election results’.
In second was ‘coronavirus’, followed by ‘Kobe Bryant’, ‘coronavirus update’ and ‘coronavirus symptoms’.
Four of those terms also made the top list of searches in the UK.
Brands creating value-added content for consumers will be pleased to hear that ‘how to’-based queries were popular in 2020.
In the UK, ‘how to make a face mask’ was the most searched term in this category ahead of ‘how to make hand sanitiser’ and ‘how to make bread’.
The latter term was indicative of the rise in home cooking and baking, which resulted in a wave of new and interesting top recipe searches.
The Greek bread pudding ‘ekmek’ was the second most popular recipe in 2020, just behind ‘dalgona coffee’.
People were also eager to make fresh ‘sourdough bread’, ‘pizza’ and ‘lahmacun’ as those three terms rounded out the top five.
While most of the data is more interesting than insightful, creatives could use some of the trends as inspiration for campaigns in the coming months.
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