Daily Authority: 🔍 Google’s year in search

🌞 Good morning! We recently got a new wand for our cat, and she really loves it. That’s a relief because she hasn’t really played with a couple of other toys we bought for her in the last few months. Moving on to the Daily, we’ve got Google’s year in search, an asteroid impact simulator, and more.

It’s that time of the year again when Google releases its year-in-review for search. There were a few expected terms and some surprises in the top 10 overall list for 2022.

The top 10, period

• Wordle was the number one search term across the board in 2022, as the addictive web-based word game went viral early this year. We even have a beginner’s guide with tips and more.
• Cricket also dominated the top 10, with searches for India vs England (second), India vs SA (fifth), India vs West Indies (seventh), and the Indian Premier League (10th).
• Current affairs made appearances in the top 10 owing to Queen Elizabeth (fourth) and Ukraine (third).
• Finally, the iPhone 14 (eighth) and serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer (ninth) also made the list. The latter is largely due to the popularity of the Netflix series.
• India was clearly a major driver for the top 10, and Indian searches also dominated when it came to food, music, and other lists.
• Otherwise, Johnny Depp, Will Smith, and Amber Heard also cracked the top 10 for people-related searches.

Going beyond text searches

We got the usual roundup of top searches by music, movies, deaths, and more. But the company also had three separate lists for Google Lens searches and a list for its Hum to Search functionality (letting you hum a song to initiate a search for it).

• We got a list for top plants and fungi, with garden roses, mushrooms, and Damask roses making up the top three.
• There’s also a Google Lens list for pets, as domestic short-haired cat, tabby cat, and polydactyl cat grabbed the top three spots.
• Finally, we got a list for houseplants. Philodendron, Devil’s Ivy, and bamboo cracked the top three.
• Meanwhile, the top hums to search songs came from Ali Sethi, BTS, and Aditya A.
• Google didn’t have a list for Assistant but noted in its blog post that “tell me a joke” and “tell me a fun fact” were top commands.
• Asking Assistant to set a 7 AM alarm was another popular request and the most popular alarm time.
• It’s pretty cool to see visual and audio searches making an appearance, and Google is anonymizing this data.
• But it still serves as a reminder that the company is always watching and listening in some capacity.

Asteroid impact simulator websites are indeed a thing, but this one by Neal Agarwal (h/t: Boing Boing) is probably the best yet. The asteroid launcher website lets you choose the type and size of asteroid (or comet), its speed and impact angle.

You can then choose your impact location from the map and get plenty of statistics in the process. Naturally, I slammed a 1000-foot-wide iron asteroid into London. It turns out that 215,000 people would be vaporized in the crater, and 4.5 million would be killed in a 5.4-mile-wide fireball. That’s not morbid at all.

Have an asteroid-free day!
Hadlee Simons, Editor.