What Was the Top Trending Google Search Every Year?

Google Search has become a vital aspect of how people stay informed about current events and pop culture occurrences. Checking out Google Trends can therefore be a great way to figure out what was on people’s minds in any given year because of the fact that this is the sort of thing that could potentially end up highlighting the keywords that were used more often at that time. Visual Capitalist just put out a report that shows what the top trending topic was by year.

With all of that having been said and now out of the way, it is important to note that the new millennium started off with a bang, with men searching for the notorious terrorist Osama Bin Laden the most and the most popular search for women turned out to be Britney Spears. Movies like Harry Potter and Shrek were also dominating Google’s search engine, and Nokia was the most popular mobile phone brand in that era.

Athletes like David Beckham continued to be hot topics in Google Search, and the Simpsons was a popular search query in 2002 which indicates the cultural relevance of the animated TV show with all things having been considered and taken into account. New stories were dominated by information coming in from Iraq, and the Sims was first released in 2002 as well which put it on the path to becoming one of the highest selling video games of all time.

Iraq’s news coverage continued to be popular through 2003, and Britney Spears also made a resurgence in this year. The most popular athlete in 2003 turned out to be Kobe Bryant, and anime imagery from Dragon Ball Z and Sailor Moon also came to the fore for the very first time.

2004 saw a lot of coverage focusing on Iraq’s dictator Saddam Hussein, and American president George W. Bush was also a trending topic given his successful reelection bid. The iPod also broke into the scene in 2004, indicating Apple’s future dominance, and the iPod mini and MP3 players became trending topics in 2005 as well.

The latter half of the 2000s saw the birth of our modern world with Steve Jobs and the iPhone trending as well as MySpace which became the first big social media platform followed by Facebook. Barack Obama also became a hugely influential figure starting with his successful election to the US presidency in 2008, and the subprime mortgage crisis also made the search term “bailout quite popular”.


The trending topics on Google each year can give an overview of whatever was on people’s minds. It is interesting to see how our searches have changed, but their general niches have remained consistent.


Read next: Apple Brand Value Grows by 35% to Reach Record Breaking $355 Billion, Amazon Comes in Second
Previous Post Next Post