[imagesource: Google]

Have you taken a moment to picture the carousel of happenings from the past year?

It was an eventful year, with high-profile deaths, court cases, and stage slaps.

But even as that all flew by, and a war raged on, a simple game of word-guessing took the top spot in Google’s search bar.

Yep, Wordle is officially the top trending search term for Google’s Year in Search review for 2022.

You almost thought it was COVID-19 didn’t you?

BBC reports that globally, Wordle really kept people on Google:

Wordle became so popular that Google searches from desperate players looking for answers affected other top Google search trends.

Seven of the top 10 searched-for word definitions in 2022 were Wordle answers including cacao, homer, canny, foray, trove, saute and tacit.

You will also have been given points if you guessed those terms related to the war in Ukraine and the death of Queen Elizabeth II, as well as cricket results being in the top five searches for the year.

Split into their own categories, the most-searched-for Actors and People saw the likes of Johnny Depp and Will Smith at the top, with others involved in that drama – Amber Heard, Chris Rock, and Jada Pinkett Smith – following closely behind.

Novak Djokovic was on top of the most searched Athletes and Serena Williams appeared as the number two, flung into the spotlight by the announcement of her retirement and the media storm that followed.

There were also the obvious movies and TV shows:

Movies
1) Thor: Love and Thunder
2) Black Adam
3) Top Gun: Maverick
4) The Batman
5) Encanto

TV Shows
1) Euphoria
2) House of the Dragon
3) Moon Knight
4) The Watcher
5) Inventing Anna

As Mashable notes, the most fun part of Google’s overview is probably the less obvious categories:

…such as top houseplants searched for with Google Lens, topped by the good old philodendron, or the top scenic hotspots on Google Maps, which is headed by the Sky Garden in London.

Google also included a local hub for Year in Search, where you can enter a ZIP code or a city name and see what people near that location searched for this year.

In South Africa, we’re not so different to the rest of the world but we did have a lot of questions:

Trending Searches
1) SRD Status Check
2) Wordle
3) Climate Change
4) Monkey Pox
5) Ukraine

Trending “What is”
1) what is vabbing
2) what is global warming
3) what is nato
4) what is the relationship between climate change and the regularity of droughts
5) what is monkeypox

Trending “How to”
1) How to check matric results online
2) How to check sassa status
3) How to apply for R350 grant
4) How to vote on big brother mzansi 2022
5) How to go live on whatsapp

Google can also search for that song that got stuck in your head if you hum, whistle, or sing 10-15 seconds of the melody into your phone to let the search engine figure it out.

The top song in the Hum to Search includes bops like ‘Butter’ by BTS and ‘Heat Waves’ by Glass Animals, with Ali Sethi’s ‘Pasoori’ taking the top spot.

Dabble around Google’s Year in Search review for 2022 here.

[sources:bbc&mashable]