With more 1 million search queries generated in the space of 76 hours, load-shedding was by far the top trending search on Google South Africa this week.
Valentine’s Day came a distant second.
After news emerged last Sunday of the impending stage 3 load shedding, South Africans had generated more than 1-million load-shedding search queries by the time Tuesday came around:
- “Loadshedding schedule” – generated more than 100k searches on Sunday
- “Load shedding schedule” – generated more than 100k searches on Sunday
- “Eskom load shedding” – generated more than 100k searches on Sunday
- “Load shedding Cape Town” – generated more than 50k searches on Sunday
- “Load shedding schedule” – generated more than 400k on Monday
- “Load shedding Johannesburg” – generated more than 20k searches on Monday
- “Load shedding schedule” – generated more than 200k search queries on Tuesday
Leading up to Valentine’s Day, South Africans generated close to 300k search queries related to the romantic festival, including searches for quotes and gift ideas:
- “Valentines Day” generated more than 100k search queries on Thursday
- “Happy Valentines Day Images” and “Valentines Day Images” generated more than 10k search queries each on Thursday, with “Happy Valentines Day 2019” generating more than 20k search queries on Wednesday
- “Valentines Day Specials 2019” generated more than 5k search queries on Thursday
- “Love quotes” generated more than 5k search queries on Thursday
- “Valentines Day quotes” generated more than 100k search queries and “Valentine messages” generated more than 50 000 search queries on Wednesday
Search trends information is gleaned from data collated by Google based on what South Africans have been searching for and asking Google. Google processes more than 40 000 search queries every second. This translates to more than a billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide. Live Google search trends data is available at https://www.google.co.za/trends/hottrends#pn=p40