Google’s Year in Search data for 2021 reveals a nation intrigued by guacamole and obsessed with blood moons. Tara Ward has the details.

Google has just released its annual Google Year in Search data, a charming list of random words that reveal what’s going on in the brains of internet-loving New Zealanders. This data charts the searches that trended (showed the greatest increase in searches) over the last 12 months, and shows what we were curious about, what was happening in the world, and what we wanted to eat. It suggests we love sports and guacamole, possibly both at the same time, and we can’t get enough of a blood moon. Are you searching “blood moon” right now? It’s fine, we’ll wait.

Whether you spent 2021 searching “apple crumble recipe” or “coinmarketcap”, this Google Year in Search data is a gateway into our hearts and minds. The full list of trending searches is here, but we’ve selected some of the more intriguing results from a year when we were all searching for… something.

Overall searches

New Zealanders were obsessed with two things in 2021: Covid-19 and sports. “Covid 19 nz”, “locations of interest” and “my covid record” were three of the most popular overall searches, while sports fans dug deep and researched things called “NBA”, “NRL”, and “cricinfo”. Seek and you shall find, or just put .com after a word and find it anyway.

TV shows

It’s no surprise Squid Games peaked as the number one trending search, given the show became the most watched in Netflix’s history earlier this year. Netflix shows dominated the TV category, and in a year when we enjoyed plenty of quality screen time, we Googled the heck out of Bridgerton, Sweet Tooth, Firefly Lane, Maid, Clickbait, The Serpent, and Ginny and Georgia. In other news, my daily search query “is Chris Warner still OK” inexplicably failed to trend for yet another year.

Famous New Zealanders

The sports love carried over to our searches for well-known New Zealanders, and the Tokyo Olympics saw medallists Lisa Carrington, Sophie Pascoe, Valerie Adams and Lydia Ko all trend. For non-athletes, Lorde made a solid showing, Judith Collins and Nicola Willis have never been so trendy, and Brian Tamaki also popped up, because he seems to pop up everywhere at the moment.

Global figures / actors

Alec Baldwin was the top trending result in both the Global Figures and Actors categories, following his involvement in a fatal shooting on a movie set in October. The second was Christopher Reeve, an intriguing result that had me Googling “Christopher Reeve” many times, possibly making this a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Thankfully, my Spinoff colleagues understand how the internet actually works, and discovered Google celebrated the late actor’s 69th birthday in September by making Reeve the Google Doodle of the day. Is this Google cooking the books? Is Big Google infiltrating us through the power of dead iconic superheroes? I will keep searching Google until I find the answers.

News (non Covid-19)

Apparently other stuff happened this year that had nothing to do with the pandemic, like “tsunami warning NZ” and “Kermadec islands”. ”Afghanistan”, “RSV” and “Kyle Rittenhouse” also trended, while we lapped up all we could about “blood moon”, possibly due to the moon hitting back after being slammed by Mark Richardson.

When…?

During a stressful year, we turned to Google to help us understand what day it was. “When is Father’s Day NZ” was the top trending “when” search, which makes sense given the day came out of nowhere during the first weeks of delta lockdown. Lockdown dominated this category, with “when is the next COVID announcement nz?”, “when is Auckland going to level 3?” and “when does lockdown end nz?” all peaking in popularity.

Sadly, we can’t blame lockdown on needing Google’s help to find out when Valentine’s Day is (it’s the same date every year, FYI), the timing of the next blood moon (May 2022) or the date of the next America’s Cup race. That’s right, mates. The America’s Cup was this year.

Food

These results are a window into our bready souls, revealing that in 2021 every New Zealander consisted of 97% comfort food and the other 3% playdough. Apple crumble, carrot cake and scones were the three biggest sweet food searches, and when you add the guacamole and pumpkin soup savoury searches into 2021’s cracked bowl of life, we easily reached our 5+ a day. Better living, everyone.

A jaded 11-year-old watches New Zealand’s defining film for the first time.

Several sessions into a Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring screening that would take many more to complete, my son started putting on an accent. In an actually pretty good approximation of Pippin’s Scottish brogue, he started asking me, “What’s for breakfast?” He’d follow that with a higher-pitched, and still pretty good: “But what about second breakfast?”

This usually happened around lunchtime. My son is nearly 12 and he should be making his own morning meals by now. When I refuse to feed him and point him in the direction of the pantry, he responds with a hunger-strike, and by late morning can be found comatose on the couch, complaining of fatigue, pretending to be Pippin. The only way to resuscitate him is with a large plate of carbs.

He was hungry, for sure. But his accent indicated something else, a sign that he might finally have started to enjoy the movie. For weeks, he’d refused to watch The Lord of the Rings with me, ignoring my requests in favour of lengthy sessions of his favourite video game, the colourful car racer Forza Horizon 5, with his friends.

His reluctance confused me. My son has already passed through many phases typical of boyhood: Lego, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and, lately, jaded eye rolls at his dad’s jokes. Lord of the Rings seems like an obvious follow-up, but first I had to convince him. The promise of hobbits, orcs, goblins and cave trolls did nothing to entice him. He’s like his dad: robots are his thing.

Finally, I convinced him to sit through the first hour. He soon had questions. Just seconds into the film, before we meet any hobbits, before Gandalf waves his magic staff, before there’s time for any second breakfasts, my son turned his head and asked: “How come there’s only one ring but it’s called Lord of the Rings?”

As an admitted fan of the film whose day job involves the process of putting words together in a grammatically correct way, I should have been able to answer that question. I couldn’t. Instead, I passed him a bowl of popcorn and told him to concentrate. I didn’t hear a peep out of him until an hour later when we had to turn it off.

I asked him what he thought of what he’d seen so far. He replied: “It’s fine, whatever, Dad.”

That first hour is The Lord of the Rings’ most boring hour. Hobbits dancing around the shire underneath the glow of fireworks did nothing to persuade my son that this movie, one that Aotearoa has based its identity on for the better part of 20 years, was any good.

I asked him if he wanted to continue. “Sure,” he replied. But it wasn’t the same kind of “sure” he delivers enthusiastically about video games, or ice cream. It was half-hearted, insincere, the kind of “sure” he gives his dad these days to shut him up.

After much pleading, and many plate loads of pasta, he sat through the much-better second hour. With more battle scenes, it seemed to connect, especially when the cave troll showed up. I asked him if he was enjoying our bitsy watch of Lord of the Rings. “Yeeeeah,” he responded warily, wondering if I was writing his comments down again (I was). “It’s pretty good. It’s cool that it’s a New Zealand film.”

It took us several more sessions to finish Jackson’s tome. As the closing credits rolled, I asked my son if he was keen to watch The Two Towers next. Without missing a beat, he rolled his eyes and replied: “We haven’t even finished the first one, Dad. There’s 28 minutes of credits to go.”

We’re talking about elves, dwarves, cave trolls and sneaky little hobbitses for an entire week. Read the rest of our dedicated Lord of the Rings 20th anniversary coverage here.