"Why" - The Most Googled Questions of 2020
So, uh, 2020 happened. A year we're all ready to leave behind; a year we're all willing to forget and pretend just didn’t happen. Because let's face it, it wasn't a pretty one. In case you forgot, the year started out with looming threats of world war three. I can remember waking up, getting on Twitter, and seeing people genuinely scared of getting drafted to potentially fight in one of the world's deadliest wars. Scared of fighting a battle they didn't want in the first place.
Now that I say that, that pretty much describes the past 12 months rather well. It's felt like a battle just to stay alive. It seemed like every week there was a new development that made us all lose a little more faith in humanity, at least for me there was. And when things are looking bad, many of us turn to our friends for answers. But when we're all experiencing the same thing, it's hard to find answers.
That's when we turn to the internet. In 2020, there were literally trillions of searches on Google. And of those trillions of trillions of searches, some were asking how, others were asking where. But an overwhelming majority of questions asked on Google started with why. If there was one word to explain 2020, that sums it up perfectly.
Stress was, without a doubt, at an all-time high for many of us. For many of us around the world, we were worried about keeping ourselves afloat with a new virus spreading around the world. Many of us wanted to know why it’s called COVID-19 and what exactly that meant. And in case you're wondering, in COVID-19, "co" stands for Corona, "vi" stands for virus, and "d" stands for disease. 19? Well, it was found in 2019. Yeah, but there are more important things than just deciphering the name.
We had to know how to stay safe, where to buy toilet paper, where to buy face masks, and where to buy hand sanitizer, which were among some of the most searched “aware” questions of 2020. As we topped over 70 million total coronavirus cases and the death toll pushed over 1.5 million, it's good to reflect on the year behind us because there won't be another one just like it.
#Hashtag COVID-19 was tweeted over 400 million times this year alone. We used the couch emoji 40% more and we probably sat on it four thousand percent more because let's be real; after months and months in quarantine, days started getting really repetitive. It's shown in the fact that we asked Google, "What day is it?" more than ever before.
We got bored. We ran out of things to do, and we needed entertainment. So, it's no surprise that "Where to buy a PS5" was up there as well. And, uh, to be honest, I still can't find one. There was a lot of downtime in 2020. A lot of really impressive and entertaining shows, such as The Queen's Gambit, were released and made us find interest in things that we may not normally enjoy.
But then there were also things like Tiger King, Joe Exotic, and Carol Baskin, which also somehow made us find interest in them. Things turned digital, like everything. If you were working an office job, you ended up doing most things from home. If you went to school, chances are you woke up every day to a Zoom class, and that kinda sucks. Many are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year to go to college, but yet are spending some of the so-called best years of their lives stuck in their own bedrooms.
And pretty quickly, we all collectively realized something: 2020 sucks. Not a lot made sense last year. Things changed, and they changed really, really fast. Life was as normal as could be, and before you know it, it changed in the blink of an eye. For example, if you're an Australian, you know this all too well. A lot happened last year and it's felt like much longer than just 12 months.
2020 began with the entire continent of Australia slowly burning away. The 2019-2020 Australian bushfire season was far beyond what we've seen in a long, long time. It became known as the Black Summer and ended up burning over 50 million acres of land across the entire continent. Thousands of buildings and homes were destroyed, but the majority of victims weren't human. Over three billion vertebrates were impacted by these fires, and it's thought that many species were driven...