Cultus
2015 Google search box was used most for searches on the terror attacks on Charlie Hebdo in January and the city of Paris in November.
Google’s been doing this overview for 15 years, and this year, as it turned the job to Google News Lab, they created the most comprehensive data tool, for the trillions of queries of the world most famous browser.
“What we started to do this year is treat it as a complex journalism exercise,” says Simon Rogers, Data editor at Google News Lab. He is an award-winning data journalist who worked at The Guardian and Twitter before joining Google in March. His team focused on making the feature more transparent, interactive, and adaptive to local search trends. “In 13 countries, we’ve done a real in-depth focus. For everybody else, it’s presented as the most popular global stories, translated into 43 languages. It’s not really something Google has released before”, explains Rogers.
The year-in-search data is a mix of queries from Google search, Google News, and YouTube. We do not have to forget that, as a news hub and aggregator, Google has some serious competition from social networks. But the truth is that after having the immediate ways of receiving breaking news on social media profiles/accounts, Google search queries show how vital googling remains. People report and share events via social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook, but they turn to Google when they want to really get the story.