Interest in Donald Trump surged higher than interest in Kamala Harris. People ate up content on Dubai chocolate bars. And the Yankees really did win. These are more insights all come from Google annual list of top trending searches, which it’s releasing today.
Google’s place is popular culture today is undisputed. It’s the biggest internet property in the world, and Google Search the most visited site. Yes, the rise of Generative AI chatbots and social apps may, one day, eat into Google’s dominance. But for now, it reigns supreme, and these results are a kind of barometer of what the world is curious about at the moment.
We’ll run through some of the results below, but first a little more on what Google is measuring. First of all, these are not the most popular search terms for 2024. Google tells me that if it built that list, the most popular things, over a whole year, would be words like “weather”, and they don’t really change, year after year.
“Year in Search” instead takes note of what surged in popularity in 2024, specifically which queries “had a high spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2024 as compared to 2023.” The aim is to sift out those perennial favourites like “weather” in order to identify what people were curious about this past year, to surface a zeitgeist.
That is to say: if people — at least those who go online — have collective thoughts and curiosities, these tables are telling us what those were this year.
Google told TechCrunch that the list is put together just from text-based searches on google.com. It doesn’t include searches on other Google properties like YouTube. And it doesn’t include queries that might have passed through its Gemini generative AI chatbot. The one exception to all that is a list of trending “hum” searches — the tool where Google lets you hum out your latest ear worm to figure out what it actually is.
You have to wonder whether how these lists will look in future years if current trends hold. Recent research (via eMarketer) found that in the U.S., younger adults have turned away from using Google for online searches, with Gen Z 25% less likely to use it compared to Gen X. Instead, they favour social media sites like TikTok to discover trends, news and answers to questions they may have. That might spur Google to include more data over time from YouTube — which still holds strong with those younger demos.
Ditto the rise of Generative AI. So far, ChatGPT from OpenAI seems to be the only one of those bots to have broken into the top 10 list of most popular websites in the world (according to SimilarWeb) — yes, those same lists that rank Google Search at the very top. Google has a decent and formidable card to play there: it’s already incorporating Generative AI results into some of its search experience, as well as offering it in standalone apps, and this gives the company an option of offering it as a complement to its basic search experience. Complement>cannibalize.
Top global search trends
These are fascinating, mainly because they underscore just how much Google is used outside of the U.S. The very top search term in 2024 compared to 2023 was a soccer (football) tournament, the Copa América; followed by another soccer tournament, the UEFA European Championship; followed by two cricket sporting events, the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup and one specific “test” between India and England. Overall, six of the top 10 search trend terms were for sporting events. (Olympics made only number 9.) The first term in the list was for Liam Payne, the One Direction singer who died earlier this year, who pipped Donald Trump to number five. iPhone 16 and Catherine, Princess of Wales, round out the list.
Searches (Global)
1. Copa América
2. UEFA European Championship
3. ICC Men’s T20 World Cup
4. India vs England
5. Liam Payne
6. Donald Trump
7. India vs Bangladesh
8. iPhone 16
9. Olympic Games Paris 2024
10. Catherine, Princess of Wales
Election insights
Are Google searches are a fascinating reflection of what is going on in the real world, or are they shaping what the real world ends up doing? Donald Trump, who won the U.S. presidential election, also topped his opponent Kamala Harris in Google searches. He appears in the top 10 global search trends (Harris does not). He was the number-one name on the global list of people search trends. (Kamala was number three.) And his gunshot incident even made it into the top 10 list for global news events. Trump outranked Harris similarly in U.S.-only trends.
Top news trends
In 2023, Google said that Israel/Gaza topped the news trends. It’s a mark of a lot that this didn’t continue to surge in 2024. Instead, this year the U.S. election topped the list for news events, a top-10 list that also included the Olympics, Rafah and Iran, and bizarrely the Menendez brothers. Natural weather disasters continued to permeate the list. And the Crowdstrike outage was a big enough mess that it too broke into the top-10.
Dubai chocolate bars
Google may be wilfully ignoring search trends on social platforms in its rankings, but it can’t really avoid them. Dubai chocolate bars — a confection that is a chocolate bar with a rich and crunchy pistachio/pastry filling — made it into multiple lists this year: top global and U.S. food recipes and viral foods. But why?
It comes down to TikTok: the bars became a sensation after a food influencer out of Dubai, where the bar first was produced, posted about it and her TikTok video went viral. That eventually bled into a million other media outlets writing about it and voila! You have a Google search trend in the making.
Nancy Meyers and her many guises
Fashion inspiration, they say, can come from anywhere. And in 2024 it came from middle-aged women in films. Nancy Meyers is a filmmaker who has been active since the early 1980s, but her real heyday was in the 1990s and early 2000s, when she made folksy, funny, sentimental, mostly family-friendly feelgood comedy into box office gold with films like the remake of The Parent Trap, Father of the Bride, and What Women Want. Many of her films feature iconic female characters who are well-off without being filthy rich, whose position was embodied in the relaxed clothes they wore. Some of that clearly has started to speak to women in the 2020s. Behold the rise of Coastal Grandmother and the 2024 incarnation, Coastal Granddaughter. Once again, thanks to prompts on social platforms like TikTok and Instagram, Meyers and Granddaughter both made it onto Google trending lists this year.
Burnt toast and orange peels: no, these are not food trends
We are a culture somewhat obsessed with food, so maybe it’s not a surprise that the top-two “internet theories” that trended in the U.S. in 2024 are references to eating. They are in fact totally unrelated otherwise. The burnt-toast theory is a modern-day, more optimistic version of what has been described variously as fatalism or determinism in philosophy: all the small things in life, including what appear to be setbacks, are all part of a bigger picture and happen for a reason. The orange peel theory is about how you can understand if someone is considerate of you: if you ask that person to peel an orange for you and they do, you’ve got a keeper… or so the theory goes. Again, both of these got their viral starts on TikTok.
