Day 259 – Year of Search

It’s been a day of chasing around, sorting stuff out and ferrying family around.

It’s been a year of protests, pandemics (well… one) and particularly heartfelt searching on Google if their review of the year is anything to go by:

Bit of tearjerker, that. But then I think anything could affect anyone in that way after the way things have gone in 2020.

I have bad news about 2021: no quick fix.

But good news too: we’ll get there.

Zeitgeist

Well done, South Africa.
The Google Zeitgeist results have been released, detailing exactly what the world was looking for in the 1.2 trillion searches done throughout 2012 and the good news is that you can narrow it down and see exactly what those people who walk amongst us were looking up this year.

You can see the full results for South Africa here, but have a few highlights courtesy of me:

The most searched image was “Lady Gaga”.
The most searched TV programme was “American Idol”.
The most searched person was “Whitney Houston”.
The most searched “How to” term, was “How to kiss”.

Can you say “Shallow”? (Although I have to say that it’s not really much better globally speaking).
And then, just in case you were wondering if things could get any worse, the most searched term overall was “OLX”.

OLX.co.za is a local online classifieds site. And that doesn’t seem so bad as your top searched term until you actually look at what it is you are searching for: “OLX”.

Why on earth would you need to search for “OLX”?

Were you perhaps struggling over the spelling of the company name? Because that spelling would be “O-L-X”, pretty much exactly what you just typed into Google.
Google is hugely useful to find shortcuts and information on a huge range of subjects. However, searching for “OLX” on Google actually just adds an extra and wholly unnecessary step to your web experience. For me, it’s just another sad reminder that people have actually stopped thinking altogether and will just autonomously Google anything rather than actually working it out for themselves.

Oh dear.

Well done, South Africa. Well done.