Google is a window into the soul. It tells us our deepest and darkest thoughts. In my case, for full disclosure, that is apparently "what are hedge funds?", "flights to Sri Lanka" and "Malta weather", so you can see where my head is at right now.
As a nation, however, we're quite basic. Like we want to appear to know what is happening, but ultimately we don't know that much and turn to Friendly Uncle Google to help us out. In a year of a global pandemic that nobody had heard of and yet seems to have turned your auntie into an expert on vaccinations and virology, you'd think that "coronavirus" or "lockdown" would be the top Google search of 2020, but you'd be wrong. It turns out that we like to talk about the US election, but have no idea about it at all.
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"US Election" was the most searched single thing, beating out "coronavirus" and, confusingly, "Caroline Flack", who's tragic death was apparently almost as important as the pandemic. "Joe Biden" was the most searched person of 2020, ahead of "Boris Johnson", "Kim Jong Un", "Philip Schofield" and "Donald Trump". It's some five-a-side team for sure, and doubtless the Donald will be banging his tiny hands on the table again at the idea that he wasn't number one.
There were some more pertinent searches in the "how to" section: "How to make a face mask" and "How to make hand sanitiser" were numbers one and two, ahead of "How to register to vote" - which, if we're being charitable, we'll say was about our own election in February and not Irish people wondering if they could cast a vote for Joe Biden. Sure, he might be ancestrally from Mayo, but we're not able to vote in their elections.
Incidentally, behind those three were "how to cut men's hair", "Make scones", "Make banana bread", "Cut your own hair" and "Make cookies", which shows just how much we enjoyed our lockdown baking and barbering. Equally revealing is our "what is" section of searching: "What are Level 3 restrictions", "what is a pandemic" and "what is 5g" ranked as a top three, which can only mean that we spend half of our lives on the internet in March and April. Which, in fairness, does seem a lot like my memory of it all.
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