It has been quite the year for news – and that is reflected in how people are searching for it

Few years have been more jam-packed for news than 2020. Coronavirus, the US election, the unexpected death of several high-profile celebrities, viral Netflix shows, murder hornets, polio-free Africa, and devastating wildfires have all hit the headlines in the past 12 months — and that is by no means an exhaustive list.

In our newsroom, we have of course reported on each one of these issues. And as someone who focuses on US audiences, I watched what Americans googled in relation to such events. What questions were they asking? Which people were they most interested in? What more did they want to know?

 As the year comes to a close, we can use data to see what some of the most searched news subjects were throughout 2020. Google trends — a tool that allows people like me to monitor what the world is searching — has released the biggest trending topics of the year, and it almost perfectly encapsulates 2020.

The top 10 trending US search terms were:

1. Election results

2. Coronavirus

3. Kobe Bryant

4. Coronavirus update

5. Coronavirus symptoms

6. Zoom

7. Who is winning the election?

8. Naya Rivera

9. Chadwick Boseman

10. PlayStation 5

These are the 10 search terms that really set the internet alight for Americans. But they’re not the only source of information available to us: another, fascinating way to parse out the data is to look at what people search for in terms of definitions. That means when people search “define”, followed by a keyword.

What people wanted definitions for in 2020 were a little different. They included “WAP” (probably prompted by the spectacularly popular Cardi B song), “entanglement”, “antebellum”, “pandemic”, “asymptomatic”, “Juneteenth” (the US holiday commemorating the end of slavery), “Bipoc” (an acronym for black and indigenous people of color which has become much more widely used this year), “quarantine”, “simp” (an online term for a man who tries to win a woman’s attention via sympathy) and “furlough”.

And then there are the most searched people of the year. For Americans, number one was Joe Biden; number two, surprisingly, was Kim Jong-un, and number three was Kamala Harris. Next came Jacob Blake, the black man shot by a police officer in Kenosha, Washington, and then celebrities: Nascar driver Ryan Newman, Tom Hanks, Shakira, quarterback Tom Brady, Kanye West, and Vanessa Bryant, wife of the late NBA star Kobe Bryant.

The busier the news agenda, the more people take to search engines to have their questions answered. As a truly unique December rolls to an end, I’m left wondering what people will be searching for in 2021. If the last year has taught us anything at all, one thing’s for sure: it’s bound to surprise us.

Yours, 

Lucy Anna Gray

US audience editor