Top 10 Google Searches in 2015

Google has become, over the years, the go-to search engine, its name becoming a synonym for looking for something on the Internet, so we’re going to take a look at the top 10 Google searches in 2015.

While the company itself may not be too happy about using its name as a verb, it’s not exactly something they have any control over it. Thankfully, a few months back they decided to create an umbrella company called Alphabet to handle all its domains of interest, lording even over Google, which handles the search business alone.

Back in the day, the amount of searches Google was handling wasn’t that large, but steadily, over the years, the number has grown and grown and grown. Nowadays, it handles about 40,000 search queries every second, which amounts to over 3.5 billion per day. Adding that up you get 1.2 trillion searches per year in the entire world.

Competitors such as Bing, Yahoo or the Chinese Baidu don’t come close to the Internet giant. Not even after the NSA scandal where Google’s name was dragged to the front row did the number of queries drop in any significant manner, although others that promise complete privacy have seen a spike in traffic.

If you’re curious, you can take a look at the 11 most googled female celebrities in the world. If not, you can just read up on the top Google searches in 2015 that were released directly from Google.

10. American Sniper

Although it was released in 2014, American Sniper is a movie that made waves in 2015 due to the Christmas release date. Basically, more people saw it after New Year’s than in 2014, so it was only natural.

There was also the issue of the 2015 award season when the movie was quite a hit, winning the best motion picture of the year award, the best performance by an actor in a leading role and best achievement in sound editing at the Oscars. It was also nominated and won various other awards. Basically, the story of Navy S.E.A.L sniper Chris Kyle swept up the world, not only the United States.

9. Caitlyn Jenner

Formerly known as Bruce Jenner, Caitlyn Marie Jenner is most recently known for being a TV personality, but back in the day she won the decathlon race at the 1976 Olympics. She’s been one of the stars of the Keeping Up with the Kardashians TV show, but following her gender transition she decided to leave the Kardashians and start anew, focusing on her own new  I am Cait show.

She came out as a transgender woman back in 2015, saying that despite her marriages and living most of her life as a man, she’s always dealt with gender dysphoria. While she’s gone through hormone replacement therapy before, it wasn’t until this year that she finally went through with it all. Her story has been on the cover of countless magazines.

8. Ronda Rousey

Rousey is a pretty well-known American expert in mixed martial arts and judo while also pursuing a career in acting. She’s quite good at what she does and even won an Olympic medal at the Summer Olympics in Beijing in 2008. While she’s normally in the news for whatever fight she’s involved in, she attracted even more attention when she served a shocking knockout to one of her opponents back in November. This year, she also made an appearance in Furious 7 where she played Kara and in the famous TV show Entourage where she played herself.

7. Fallout 4

Arguably one of the most eagerly awaited game of the year, Fallout 4 has made it onto the list of the top Google searches of 2015. Released in November, the game is available for multiple platforms, including PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Microsoft Windows.

The developers really built up the anticipation for this game, especially since an official trailer was released back in June, although talk about the game has been going on for over a year. There are countless positive reviews out there and more and more people are doing their best to get the game and the necessary time to enjoy it properly.

6. Furious 7

Following the tragic death of actor Paul Walker, the hype around the seventh part of the Fast and Furious franchise grew exponentially. While the movies are usually surrounded by quite a bit of excitement, the untimely death of one of the main actors in the movie has attracted even more curious people looking to find out just how the directors were going to go about wrapping up the movie without Walker. The answer was hiring his similar-looking brother and adding Paul’s features over his face.

The film made $353 million at the US box office and an extra $1.1 billion in foreign countries, adding up to over $1.5 billion in total.

5. Paris

While Paris is always a great city and should be in the world’s top online searches for its sheer beauty and historical value, this year, Paris has been in the news for very sad reasons. Back in January, the Charlie Hebdo newsroom was the scene of a mass shooting. Two brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi armed themselves with assault rifles and other weapons and killed 11 people and injured another 11 within the building, only to take their anger on others upon fleeing the scene. They belonged to Islamist terrorist group Al-Qaeda and were upset with various drawings published by the magazine.

Then, in November, Paris was once more the target of terrorist attacks, this time with 6 big targets, including the Stade de France and the Bataclan theater. 130 people have died at the hands of 7 attackers who were part of the terrorist group the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

4. Jurassic World

Let’s be honest here, dinosaurs are some of the most fascinating creatures in the world, especially since there is yet so much to know about the time they lived in and the truth about their disappearance. There have been several movies trying to depict what would happen if, somehow, thanks to DNA samples, we’d be able to bring dinosaurs back to life.

This year, Jurassic World was released, featuring Chris Pratt and Bryce Dallas Howard. The movie brought in over $652 million in the US and an extra billion in foreign countries.

3. Agar.io

If you’re wondering just what this is and why it is so popular, then you must know it’s actually a… game. Yep, it’s a mobile game that has managed to make the world go nuts in 2015. Originally a web game, Agar.io made its way to mobile, allowing users to try to become the biggest cell in a petri dish by eating other players in their quest. You just have to survive and eat long enough to become the biggest link of the food chain. The game has tens of millions of installs on Android alone, with over 2.2 million people going as far as giving it a rating, which we all know isn’t something we do very often.

2. Charlie Hebdo

Although we mentioned this particular name a few pages back, Charlie Hebdo is something we need to talk about again since it made it to the second place of this year’s top Google searches.

First of all, this is a name associated with a French satirical weekly magazine that features cartoons, reports, polemics, and jokes. They’re anti-racists, they’re atheists, support secular topics and the far left political wing. At the same time, free speech is, or it should be, a universal right, especially when it comes to the press.

That didn’t seem to matter on January 7, when two extremists entered the headquarters of the magazine, opened fire and killed members of the staff only to flee the scene and cause havoc in other areas as well.

1. Lamar Odom

Lamar Odom is a well-known name for basketball fans. He used to be a member of the LA Clippers, the Miami Heat, the LA Lakers, the Dallas Mavericks and more. Along with the Lakers, he even won the NBA championship in 2009 and 2010.

Despite all his successes he is most recently known for being married to Khloe Kardashian, the member of the famous clan with its own reality TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. He and Khloe even had their own reality series, Khloe & Lamar to amp up the fame.

Unfortunately, this year he was also in the news due to a different type of reason – he is believed to have overdosed on cocaine and other drugs and was found unconscious in a Nevada brothel. If that wasn’t bad enough, he spent a few days in a coma and was placed on life support before regaining consciousness, suffering strokes and kidney failure in his time there.

Even though he was in the process of divorcing Kardashian, it seems like for the time being the two have mended fences and decided to remain together in the aftermath of the overdose. This has made Lamar Odom one of the top Google searches in 2015, although it’s clear that in the global pool the US Google users weighted the most since Lamar isn’t that famous in the rest of the world to get to the top of the list.