Culture
20 Years of Top Trending Google Searches
20 Years of Top Trending Google Searches
For decades, Google search has been a go-to source for many when looking up directions, keeping up with the news, or seeking information on new and unfamiliar topics.
Today, Google processes about 3.5 billion searches per day. Because of its dominant market share, Google holds a vast archive of keyword searches that, when analyzed, provide an interesting glimpse into the key themes that have captured the world’s attention over the years.
This graphic, using data from Google Trends, goes back 20 years and highlights some of the top keyword searches since 2001.
Our editorial team dug through hundreds of top trending search terms from global and U.S. data and hand-selected their top picks, which are featured in the graphic above.
Trending vs. Volume
Before diving in, it’s worth emphasizing how top trending searches differ from popular searches, which are measured by sheer volume.
Trending searches are terms that have recently spiked in popularity. They focus on growth rather than total volume, and in this dataset, trending terms gauge year-over-year growth.
A good example is Donald Trump, who popped up in the news cycle during the 2016 presidential campaign. After the election, interest in Trump remained high. But his name doesn’t pop up on the Google trends list after 2017, since by that point, search volume for Trump had plateaued.
What are the most popular Google search terms, by volume? To be honest, they’re slightly less interesting than the top trending searches — YouTube is number one, followed by Facebook, then WhatsApp web.
The Globalization of Search Trends
The people and topics featured in Google’s top trends lists evolves as time goes on, reflecting broader adoption of the internet (and Google Search) around the world over time. Early themes are tied to mainstream U.S. pop culture and tech trends.
As time goes on, social media and smartphone adoption increase the granularity and volume of searches, resulting in top trends that are more participatory, diverse, and global in nature.
One final variable to keep in mind is that Google itself began to share more detailed search highlights with each passing year.
Two Decades of Google Searches: Macro Insights
Now that we’ve explained what trending searches actually measure, let’s dig into some of the key themes that have emerged over the last two decades of Google searches.
① People Love Sports
Over the last 20 years, sports have remained a continuous trend.
Every four years, the World Cup shows up as a top trending keyword across the globe. The Olympics also makes a regular appearance, along with Olympic athletes like Michael Phelps and McKayla Maroney.
Although the U.S. dominates the list, particularly when it comes to athletes, there’s still a good variety of international sports that go viral, especially as time goes on. In the last two years, cricket, rugby, and soccer have all made the top five trending lists.
② The Emergence of Celebrity 2.0
Over time, you can also see a transition from the conventional celebrity to celebrity 2.0, also known as the social media celebrity.
In the early 2000s, pop culture icons like Britney Spears, Eminem, and Jennifer Lopez flooded the trending searches, and traditional media forms like TV shows and Movies dominated the mass media categories.
But by 2011, YouTube stars like Rebecca Black started to make their way on the trending search lists. And in 2014, Meme emerged as a top trending category.
This transition nods to a larger shift in media, as digital has gradually overtaken traditional media as the dominant form of entertainment.
③ Natural Disasters are Top of Mind
Natural Disasters are a key trend throughout this data set as well.
Hurricanes are a particularly trendy word, showing up almost half the time—in eight of the 20 years. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina ranked second in the most searched category across the globe.
It continued to gain global attention—by 2006, Hurricane Katrina was still in the top five trending news searches.
Dig Deeper into Trending Google Searches
Our team enjoyed sifting through 20 years of Google data, and we hope you enjoyed this blast from the past too. If you’d like to dive deeper, you can explore Google’s full dataset here.
Happy searching.
History
Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives
The daily routines of 16 famous creatives—poets, thinkers, scientists and even politicians—are charted for comparison with each other.
Creator Program
Visualized: The Daily Routines of Famous Creatives
What is the best daily routine to unlock creativity, or is there such a thing?
Many modern suggestions for optimizing creativity—like scheduling time for “deep work,” and building small, sustainable “atomic habits”—can be traced back to famous creatives in many different eras. And though they all found success, they employed different methods as well.
In this unique visualization, RJ Andrews from InfoWeTrust has charted how notable creatives in different fields spent their days. He picked 16 of the 161 “inspired minds” covered by Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, a book by writer and editor Mason Currey published in 2013.
How Much “Creativity Time” in Famous Daily Routines?
Dividing the day into 24 hours, Andrews denoted certain categories for daily activities like working creatively, sleeping, and other miscellaneous endeavors (meals, leisure, exercise, and social time).
For the creatives with a separate day job—Immanuel Kant and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart—their ordinary labor is also counted in miscellaneous activities.
Below is a breakdown of the daily routine of all 16 people featured above:
| Name | Occupation | Creative (hrs) | Sleep (hrs) | Miscellaneous (hrs) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maya Angelou | Writer/Poet | 9 | 7.5 | 7.5 |
| W.H. Auden | Poet | 11.5 | 7 | 5.5 |
| Honoré de Balzac | Novelist | 13.5 | 8.5 | 2 |
| L.V. Beethoven | Composer / Pianist | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Le Corbusier | Architect | 8.5 | 7 | 8.5 |
| Charles Darwin | Naturalist / Biologist/ Geologist | 7 | 8 | 9 |
| Charles Dickens | Writer | 5 | 7 | 12 |
| Gustave Flaubert | Novelist | 10.5 | 7 | 6.5 |
| Sigmund Freud | Psychologist | 12.5 | 6 | 5.5 |
| Benjamin Franklin | Writer / Inventor / Scientist / Statesman | 8 | 7 | 9 |
| Victor Hugo | Writer | 2 | 8 | 14 |
| Immanuel Kant | Philosopher | 7 | 7 | 10 |
| Thomas Mann | Novelist | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| John Milton | Poet | 8 | 7 | 9 |
| W.A. Mozart | Composer / Pianist | 8 | 5 | 11 |
| P.I. Tchaikovsky | Composer | 4.5 | 8 | 11.5 |
The average and median amount of time spent on creative work for these individuals was just over 8 hours a day. At the extremes were two French novelists, Honoré de Balzac with 13.5 hours daily spent on creative work, and Victor Hugo with only 2 hours.
Interestingly, the allocation of creative work time was different in almost every daily routine. Maya Angelou’s routine resembles the modern work day, with the bulk of her writing between 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Others like Kant and Mozart had creativity blocks when time allowed, such as before and after their teaching jobs.
Then there are outliers like Honoré de Balzac and Sigmund Freud, who worked as much as they could. Balzac wrote from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. with just an hour and a half nap break in between, fueled by up to 50 cups of coffee. Freud split up his creative work into three different blocks: analyzing patients in the morning, consulting in the afternoon, and reading and writing journals into the late evening.
But somewhere in their days, most of these brilliant minds made sure to get a good rest, with an average of 7.25 hours of sleep across the board.
Schedule Yourself to Create Success
Creativity may ebb and flow, but these great minds had one clear thing in common: scheduling time for creative work.
The perfect daily routine was usually what fit in with their lifestyle (and their bodies), not based on an arbitrary amount of work. For example, night owls with later chronotypes worked late, while socialites and politicians found time outside of their commitments.
They also found time to move and enjoy life. Half of the people in the dataset specified exercise in their accounts—either leisurely strolls or fast walks. Many also scheduled social time with partners, friends, or children, often paired with a meal.
Perhaps the greatest insight, however, is that the day-to-day routine doesn’t have to look extraordinary to be able to create extraordinary work.
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