If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a Google search is worth a million, according to the curators of “Google’s Year in Search in 2019.”
The tech giant on Wednesday announced the most frequent news, politics, and culture searches among Spanish-speaking people in the United States and some, such as Disney+, “Game of Thrones” and iPhone 11, all of which dominated conversations in the last year, may not prove too surprising.
However, others such as polygamy and “Roma” may warrant further analysis about the moments and issues that mattered the most to U.S.-based Spanish speakers.
“The reasoning behind some searches can be easy for us to identify, like “Roma,” Jesús Garcia, head of Hispanic Communications at Google and YouTube, said of the groundbreaking black and white film that earned Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón his second Oscar for best director. “It also makes sense that searches for polygamy spiked during Nov. 3-Nov. 9, when news of members of a Mexican-American Mormon family dying in an ambush broke.”
As for why meningitis, chlamydia and pulmonary fibrosis were also among the top searches in 2019 for U.S. Spanish speakers, Garcia said he couldn’t pinpoint a specific reason, besides the fact that “we often go to Google to look up the things we are curious about and the things we don’t dare to ask our friends.”
The Google lists were broken into six categories: the most frequent general searches, movie searches, recipe searches and searches that began with “what is, “where” and “how.”
“The most frequently searched recipes are always interesting and fun,” Garcia told NBC News. “Some of them remain consistent from year to year, but others fluctuate, which speaks to people’s evolving taste buds.”
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Recipes for guacamole, for example, routinely show up on lists of frequent Google searches, so it wasn’t staggering that the avocado-based spread would make the list again this year, according to Garcia. To him, it was more curious that capirotada, a Mexican bread pudding that is usually prepared around Easter, would be the top recipe search among Spanish speakers in the U.S.
“Capirotada is not as widely known or as Americanized in the U.S. as guac is,” Garcia said. “It’s more complex to make and requires a specific sort of preparation, whereas with guac, it’s a lot easier to find the ingredients. So to see capirotada trending in the U.S. is interesting.”
Other search results Garcia found noteworthy included “Dónde voto?” which translates to “Where do I vote?” in Spanish and “Hurricane Dorian,” the category 5 storm that killed more than 50 people.
“People in the Caribbean and in Florida were watching Dorian. All eyes were on this hurricane, because people didn’t know where it was going to go,” Garcia said.
That U.S. Spanish speakers also frequently asked where to vote is emblematic of the current cultural moment, where Latinos are poised to be the largest minority voting bloc in 2020, and the timing of local and state elections.
A number of the most frequent searches among U.S. Spanish speakers overlapped with the most frequent global Google searches in 2019, including Copa América, the South American soccer competition, and Jussie Smollett.
For the full list of 2019’s most frequent Google searches, visit google.com/2019.
