Google's Top Searches In 2014 Reveals Popularity Of Medical News, From ALS Ice Bucket Challenge To Ebola
What would we do without Google? It’s become a regular part of our day and even a verb — when you don’t know something, just Google it. In 2014, the world typed in trillions of searches for every question and curiosity they could think up. Google just released its annual trends report, revealing what people around the world were typing onto their keyboard, into their touchscreen phones, and asking Siri on their iPhones this year.
The top global trending search was Robin Williams’s tragically unexpected death in August, followed by the World Cup and Ebola. Williams’s suicide inspired more searches for depression tests and mental health questions, and a slew of other medical concerns. According to Time, 2014 was a year filled with more generic terms, such as weather. But there was also a high influx of medical and health concerns.
The most trending searches included Ebola, which with contagious concern became one of the biggest health crisis scares in history. It spread from Africa and throughout other countries until it hit America’s health care workers, who brought it back to America and raised even more alarm. The ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was frequently searched because of the questions that it brought: Why are people dumping ice on their heads? What is ALS? Why is money awareness being raised?
To translate the world’s searches into a visual presentation, Google produced a video about their top trends. It infers our searches say something about who we are as individuals, as countries, and as an entire world. The commonality of our search terms were “hope,” with the pursuit of inspiration. What we search for every day tells us more about ourselves than the answers they can provide us, and that one term strings thousands and sometimes millions of people together under one word, phrase, quote, or question.