It seems like yesterday when a search engine called Google began to face to the, at that time, all-powerful directories like Yahoo! With an advanced web browsing system and a complex algorithm for presenting search results, the project of two Stanford students, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, gradually gained the preference of a growing number of users. from Internet. Nobody knew (although undoubtedly Page and Brin did aspire to it), but over the years Google became the giant that it is today.
Surely, at this point you are wondering why I speak of 20 years in the title of this news, if Google was incorporated as a company and began offering its search service in 1998. The reason for this is that I am not referring to its beginnings, but to the moment in which, when it had already started to become an actor to be taken into account on the network, it began to collect which had been the most common searches during each anus.
This tradition was established 20 years ago, in 2001, and surely we will soon know what we have searched the most throughout this 2021. And until that new, and always interesting information arrives, what we can do is review, in Trends, the history of the most common searches in each of the last 20 years. An exercise that has its part of nostalgia, of course, but that also offers us a most interesting chronology of the last 20 years of history, based on searches by Google users.
For example, if we go to the list that compiles searches for 2001, we see that the most searched brand on Google was the almighty Nokia, whose mobile phones were, we can not doubt, the most popular of the moment. Those were times when the Mp3 phenomenon was so powerful that it even has its own category in Google’s roundup, with Morpheus, Napster, Gnutella, Kazaa, and Audiogalaxy in the top five positions. That year the most wanted man was Nostradamus, while the ranking of women was headed by Britney Spears.
Look of Google in 1998.
If we want to find information about searches in Spain we have to jump to 2008, which is the first year that Google has already collected specific data on our country. A year in which we left our eyes on TV (or on the PC screen) watching Heroes, Prison Break, Lost, House and, closing the ranking of the five most wanted series, Los Hombres de Paco. There is no mention in the summary of that year (neither in the international nor in the Spanish), yes, the fall of Lehman Brothers and the nightmare that was unleashed from that moment.
From the following year, 2009, Google only kept for Spain the list of what it called emerging, which were Facebook, Series Yonkis, Taringa, Google Translate and Tuenti. We have to go to the international summary to find other interesting data, such as that the searches for emerging purchases of the year were Windows 7, Tamiflu, Alli, Nokia N97 and LightScribe, that technology so cool that it allowed to stamp images on the top plate of compact discs using the laser of the recorder itself.
You could follow this timeline year after year until you get to the 2020 summary. However, my personal recommendation is that you do it, that you explore the Google summaries of these last 20 years, and that you find yourself remembering yourself in that context. I have been doing it for a few hours (spread over several days) and, the truth is, it is turning out to be a most interesting memory exercise for me. Thus, in the absence of a time machine that allows us to go back to those years, we can at least review them. And just like we did last year, when we meet those of 2021 we will also tell you about them.
