Searches for ‘Malta’ hit a peak at end of November
What were people around the world Googling this year?
The word ‘Malta’ saw a spike in Google search between November 24 and 30, according the list of search terms for 2019 released by the giant company.
The period of this peak directly correlates with the news that the middleman in the investigation into the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galicia – Melvin Theuma – had requested a presidential pardon in return for giving information.
A search term is determined by the exact word or set of words a user enters when researching a topic.
A Google trend chart works on a point system of 1 to 100. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term and represents the highest point on the chart for the given region and time.
Between November 17 and 23, the rating for ‘Malta’ climbed to 78, but by the following week, the 24th to the 30th, it had risen and peaked at 100.
Despite a dip in the search term between December 1 and 7, the word ‘Malta’ still had a high rating of 84.
The search terms – released on December 11 – also revealed what people were Googling around the world when it came to news, celebrities and big sporting events.
In the US, Disney’s new streaming service ‘Disney Plus’ was the biggest search trend of 2019, followed by American actor Cameron Boyce and rapper Nipsey Hussle, who died in March, aged 33.
Number four on the list was Hurricane Dorian, which was the most intense tropical cyclone on record to strike the Bahamas, while number five was actor Luke Perry who died of a stroke in March.
Television shows also featured heavily in the top 10, including Game of Thrones, which was partially filmed in Malta during its first year.
The final season aired in 2019 to much anticipation and debate and drove a huge amount of the searches on Google at that time.
It was followed by Netflix’s Stranger Things and When They See Us, then HBO’s Chernobyl and Disney Plus’s The Mandalorian.