Taylor Swift is so popular that seismologists measured recent tour dates in Seattle as a magnitude 2.3 earthquake. You wouldn’t know if from the latest edition of Google’s annual annual “Year In Search” roundup, though. Every December, the company publishes a list of the year’s most popular search terms. But one name is conspicuously absent from the 2023 edition.
The queen of pop isn’t on any of Google’s 2023 trending search categories, despite the fact that Time Magazine recently named her Person of the Year. For example, Shakira tops the most searched musicians globally, while “Try That In a Small Town” singer Jason Aldean takes first place in the United States. What’s more, outside of the official lists, Google’s promotional video celebrating its Year In Search names Taylor Swift as “the most searched songwriter.” Apparently, songwriters don’t count as musicians. And why aren’t other songwriters itemized into a top 5, like the rest of the categories? What’s even stranger is Google’s own data shows Taylor blowing both Shakira and Aldean out of the water.
You can see the popularity of various search terms using the Google Trends app. Swift beat Aldean every day of the year in 2023 except July 16th to July 22nd. She outperformed Shakira by similar measures, with more searches throughout the entire year aside from a brief period where Shakira took the top spot in January when the Colombian singer released a song slamming her ex-boyfriend Gerard Piqué.
Google might have its thumb on the scale to cancel Taylor Swift, but some of her ex-lovers make several appearances on the company’s year-end lists, including singers Joe Jonas and Matt Healy. Her current beau Travis Kelce of the Kansas City Chiefs appears on lists of most searched athletes and the most searched people in general. That makes her absence even stranger because Swift is the sole reason for the recent skyrocketing interest in her boyfriend.
Google spokesperson Colette Garcia told us there’s a simple explanation for this confusion. Basically, Taylor Swift topping the trending lists would just be boring. “Top trending lists make for more colorful and interesting data pulls and are generally better at identifying what people were curious about in 2023 relative to 2022,” Garcia said. “The ‘trending’ queries are the searches that had a high spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2023 as compared to 2022. Taylor Swift is someone who consistently has a high amount of Search interest, not someone who had a big spike in 2023 as compared to 2022.”
In other words, Google’s Year in Search list is looking for big searches that weren’t also topping charts last year. This makes a certain amount of sense. It’s a lot more interesting to see “Grimace Shake” and “Lasagna Soup” top the recipe list over “Chicken Soup” or whatever.
As for the Year In Search video, it lists Swift because it highlights the most searched terms of all time (or at least going back to 2004), Garcia said. So, Swift kind of tops all the competition if you think about it.
For Google’s sake, let’s hope the reasoning is enough to quell her rabid army of fans.
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