[ad_1]
Why were corn flakes invented? In what is the kingdom Tangled up called? Why is the sky blue?
No, you have not clicked the Things questionnaire by accident; Those are some of the questions that worried Kiwis in 2020, based on the year in Google searches.
The statistics measure trending topics, or the increase in search terms year over year, and unsurprisingly, they show that Covid-19 was the dominant topic for the last 12 months.
Composite: Things
Kobe Bryant and bread recipes were more obvious search terms than cornflakes.
The most trending search term in New Zealand was Coronavirus. Also in the top ten were Zoom, the online learning tools SeeSaw and Education Perfect, from the Ministry of Health and Labor and Income.
READ MORE:
* All I want for Christmas is tofu – Vegan recipes have the biggest increase in searches for Christmas food in New Zealand
* Yes, You Can Bake Healthier Cakes and Cookies – Here’s How
* Zoom boss says he’s winning the video conferencing race
* Coronavirus: Tiger King and bread top Google search trends during Covid-19 lockdown
The coronavirus was also the most trending news event, ahead of the US elections, the bushfires in Australia or the New Zealand elections, which came in at places 2, 3 and 4.
The How … questions that we Google also produce some surprises. We wonder how to make face masks, use hand sanitizer, vote in the general election, and use Zoom.
Supplied
We were very interested in knowing how to make face masks this year.
There were several food products we were eager to know how to make: buttermilk, pancakes, leavened flour, naan bread, and bread, though oddly no sourdough, but trending higher than any of them was the question, “How do you lose weight ? “
But between the coronavirus and lockdown-related searches, dead celebrities (Kobe Bryant and Naya Rivera), global figures (politicians, actors and performers, Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin), and hot cross bun recipes, Scones and banana bread were some unexpected gems.
Our query on the invention of corn flakes was the most trending “Why” question this year, while “Why is the sky blue?” came in fourth place.
We wanted to know about that kingdom in the 2010 Disney Rapunzel story Tangled up, and also – between “What is a pandemic?”, “What is Level 2?” and “What is Antifa?” – what is meant by the word “simp”.
It turns out that cornflakes entered our Google stats late, as in about September the media began to follow up on claims that Kellogg founder John Harvey Kellogg developed cornflakes as a tool for prevent women from masturbating.
In case you’re wondering, and Google trends suggest yes, it appears to be true. That he developed them for that purpose, that is; its effectiveness is doubtful.
Supplied
The Disney movie Tangled was released a decade ago, but this year it was trending for a surprising reason.
Simp, to save you another search, is a term with a complicated etymological history (this article has a very good summary) that has recently been adopted by the TikTok generation to refer to someone who has a lot of affection for a person, celebrity or even object to despite not recovering any.
It’s not so immediately clear why they were interested in why the sky is blue (particularly given in some parts of New Zealand, at least it’s been decidedly gray), but to save you a few keystrokes, here’s NASA’s answer : “Sunlight reaches the Earth’s atmosphere and is scattered in all directions by all gases and particles in the air. Blue light is scattered more than the other colors because it travels as smaller, shorter waves. That’s why we see a blue sky most of the time. “
So that’s New Zealand in 2020 in a nutshell: homeschooling, baking, video conferencing, decoding teenage speech, and blue sky thinking.
Oh, and the kingdom in Tangled up? It’s called Corona.
