As 2015 comes to a close, Google has released its annual Year in Search, and the top searches go to former basketball player Lamar Odom, Jurrasic World, and American Sniper.
The year was book-ended by tragic events in Paris — from the shooting at Charlie Hebdo in January to the multiple attacks around the city in November. And those events are among the top that drew the highest number of Internet searches,according to Google.
The Year in Search 2015 video, set to moving music and Caitlyn Jenner’s inspirational ESPYs acceptance speech, focuses on searches like “how can I help the refugees,” “how can we overcome prejudice,” and “how can the world find peace.”
The annual breakdown ranks the inquiries that triggered the biggest spikes in traffic on Google’s dominant search engine, excluding queries about sexually explicit subjects.
Google processes two out of every three search requests in the world, a position that translates into trillions of inquiries each year.
Lamar Odom’s bizarre downfall from a former Los Angeles Lakers star to a lost soul in a Nevada brothel had the world searching Google for answers more than any other topic this year.
The interest in Odom eclipsed January’s lethal attacks in France at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a mobile game called Agar.io that lets multiple players devour cells in a virtual petri dish. In the US, two movies, Jurassic World and American Sniper, ranked behind Odom.
Odom, 36, also was Google’s most-searched person on its 2015 world rankings, followed by former mixed martial arts bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey and Caitlyn Jenner, who was Odom’s father-in-law before transitioning to life as a woman in 2015.
Rousey was the most searched athlete in the US, edging out Holly Holm, the woman who pummelled her last month to take her championship title.
Google also provided the lists for the top searches in a wide variety of categories, including movies (Jurassic World), television (Big Brother Brazil) and musical artists (Adele).
OVERALL TOPICS
1. Former Los Angeles Lakers star Lamar Odom
2. Satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo
3. Mobile game Agar.io
4. Movie Jurassic World
5. Paris
6. Movie Furious 7
7. Video game Fallout 4
8. Former mix marital arts bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey
9. Caitlyn Jenner, formerly 1976 Olympic decathlon champion Bruce Jenner
10. Movie American Sniper
TOP PEOPLE
1. Lamar Odom
2. Ronda Rousey
3. Caitlyn Jenner
4. Singer Adele
5. Actor Charlie Sheen
6. Actress Ruby Rose
7. Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump
8. Singer Sia
9. Actress Dakota Johnson
10. Broadcaster Jeremy Clarkson
“The 2015 Year in Search goes deeper than we’ve ever gone before. This year, we’re covering hundreds of news stories, sharing interactive guides and charts, and diving into the numbers by sharing things like how many times people searched for Adele (439 million, if you want to know),” said Amit Singhal, senior vice president of Google Search in the blog post announcement.
The year’s top trending people, after Lamar Odom, were Caitlyn Jenner, Ronda Rousey, and unsurprisingly, Donald Trump. The Top Charts show more information ranging from “top dog” questions to GIF searches.