Paul Walker ahead of Mandela in Google’s ‘trending’ lists
The Fast & Furious star, who died in a car crash last month, topped both Google’s “trending people” and “trending searches this year”. That put him eight places above Mandela in terms of trending searches and three places ahead when it came to trending people.
In the latter category, Mandela was beaten by another dead actor, Corey Monteith, and a more controversial South African, murder-accused Oscar Pistorius.
He is one of the lesser spotted cabinet ministers on our television screens but the country’s economic woes still made an unlikely Google hit out of Environment Minister Phil Hogan.
As the administrator of the property tax, he pipped even Taoiseach Enda Kenny to the title of “top trending politician”. In fact, the tax itself was the fifth highest overall search entry on Google this year.
Her musical offerings would not have been enough to put Miley Cyrus at the top of many people’s charts. However, thanks mainly to flagrant flaunting of her body parts, she topped Google’s top trending artists — even beating One Direction.
Such was her complete transformation from wholesome former idol for tweens that she contributed hugely towards Google’s top “what is” search — “what is twerking?”
On the sporting front, the British and Irish Lions may have topped the “trending sports teams”, but it was a much less mainstream sport which generated the most searches for an individual sportsman, mixed martial artist Conor McGregor.
The only other Irishman to make the top 10 in that category was Niall Donoghue, the Galway hurler who tragically died in October.
Love/Hate may have been the homegrown television highlight of 2013, but Irish searches on Google proved it was criminal antics on the other side of the Atlantic which most captivated audiences, with Breaking Bad topping the table.
Love/Hate could only manage eighth place, with Operation Transformation and the Rose of Tralee generating more online interest.
