No surprises for what’s occupied search this year, but it might surprise you how much relates to it.
The year is only half done, but what a year it’s been. No one could have guessed how this year would have played out, but we’re all searching in much the same way.
It’s halfway through the year, and Google has released six months of search trends in Australia, showing just what the country has been searching for the past six months, though we suspect you won’t be surprised.
With the COVID-19 coronavirus taking hold of pretty much everything, at least half of the top 20 searches for the year relate, and there’s no shock why.
While the coronavirus sits at number one, the top 20 topics searched on Google in the past six months feel very much at home with that search, as Australians took to Google to ask about social distancing (2), panic buying (4), pandemic (7), hand sanitiser (8), Spanish flu (10), social isolation (13), quarantine (14), furlough (16), epidemic (19), and stockpile (20).
Coronavirus also took hold of our questions, as we asked the important questions:
- How many cases of coronavirus in Australia?
- What is coronavirus?
- How did coronavirus start?
- How many people have died from coronavirus?
- What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
And perhaps rather unsurprisingly, the top searches revolved around the coronavirus, looking at the term “coronavirus” and how it connected with Australia (1), update (2), stats (3), worldometer (4), Victoria (5), death toll (6), news (8), USA (10), Italy (11), NSW (13), Sydney (14), and Tasmania (16).
You’d be excused for thinking the coronavirus was all Australians searched for, and while it ranked highly over the past six months, it wasn’t entirely what Aussies checked out. They also look at Jobkeeper payments, Masterchef, bushfires, and the Netflix show Tiger King.
However perhaps unsurprisingly, coronavirus was the dominant topic of conversation for people using Google in Australia, and it’s one that may keep up. With the coronavirus not exactly extinguished in Australia or elsewhere, it’s highly possible that when Google shows the year’s most popular searches at the end of the year, the coronavirus will still be in there.
