Google search results: Here’s what Ireland searched for most in 2017
By Catherine Shanahan
When it comes to hot topics in Ireland, you’d be forgiven for thinking: Drink, religion, politics, Teresa Mannion.
In fact Teresa, viral since Storm Desmond, has most in common with the topic closest to our heart - the weather - or more specifically - Hurricane Ophelia.
Google, having crunched the numbers, has identified this mighty October storm (an ex-hurricane by the time it hit our shores) as the top trending topic of the year among its Irish googlers.
Next up was The Donald, climbing from fourth spot in 2016, but let’s face it - whose interest could not but be piqued at the prospect of the leader of the Free World treating each day like an episode of a TV (horror) show where he crushes his opponents?
In fairness, we did spend time trying to decipher the madness, googling “what is covfefe?” right after The Donald tweeted last May: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” We also asked Google to explain DACA after The Donald called for it to be repealed. In case you are late coming to it, it’s an American immigration policy that allowed some individuals who entered the country illegally as minors, to receive a renewable two-year period of deferred action from deportation and to be eligible for a work permit.
The top-trending sports event was our ultimately doomed World Cup qualifying matches against Denmark. The McGregor vs Mayweather fight was the second most popular sporting event but clearly, this presented difficulties for some viewers, as we had to ask Google “How to watch McGregor vs Mayweather”. In fact this was the second most asked question in the “How to..” section, right after a query straight from a Mensa member: "How to make slime". Yes kids, it was that kind of year.
We redeemed ourselves somewhere in choice of movies - our favourite movie search of the year was Christopher Nolan’s Second World War epic Dunkirk, despite the global hype around La La Land.
When it came to asking “What is…” we were very taken by the Google Doodle of a, well, antikythera mechanism, a 2,000-year-old ancient Greek ’astronomical computer’.
When it came to recipes, meat was our beef, with spaghetti Bolognese the most googled, followed by, chilli con carne and beef stroganoff.
