Google Trends 2015: of all the countless things people typed into the Google search box this year, the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January and the city of Paris in November topped the list. That’s not nearly so surprising as the entirely new way Google determined and presented that information.
The findings are the the result of Google’s Year In Search, which is a kind of metadata journalism—news about the news that people cared about. Google’s been doing it for 15 years. It created a remarkably comprehensive package, one that used trillions of queries as its data pool. The results are presented as raw search numbers, downloadable datasets, interactive elements, and embeddable components.
The Year In Search is heavy on visualization tools to help navigate 2015’s major events.
Go to Google.com/2015 to explore the rest of the 2015 Year in Search stories and top trending charts from around the world.
The top Search for 2015 was: Paris Attack
” On Friday, November 13, a theater, stadium, restaurant and cafe were attacked by terrorists, and the world desperately tried to find out if loved ones were safe and what had happened in the city of light. These coordinated attacks were the deadliest on French soil since World War II.”
Elie Chahine 