Euro 2016, Olympics and David Bowie top Google searches in Ireland

The performance of Martin O’Neill’s Boys in Green in France made Euro 2016 the most-searched online trend in a year when sports, international politics, and celebrity deaths dominated Irish internet activities.

Bruce Springsteen playing Dublin last May

The summer soccer tournament is revealed today as the top trending search on Google in Ireland this year. While figures on the number of times people typed ‘Euro 2016’ into the search engine were not provided, Google said the feast of football beat mobile game craze Pokemon Go into second place.

The most-trending searches here this year also featured the Olympics in August at number six, with ‘Ireland v New Zealand’ scraping into 10th place.

Rather than the most-searched words or phrases by Irish users of Google, the chart is based on queries with the highest amount of traffic over a sustained period this year compared to 2015.

David Bowie and Prince trended higher than any other of the long list of celebrities who passed away in 2016, making numbers three and seven respectively.

The many faces of David Bowie

While domestic politics dominated the Irish news media with the drawn-out process to form a government after last February’s general election, overseas polls pushed that ballot out of the 10-top search trends.

Donald Trump trended fourth in Irish Google searches this year, followed closely by Brexit. ‘US election’ was not far behind in eighth.

In ninth place, Suicide Squad was the top-trending movie, with other popular film-related searches being for fellow-superhero flicks Batman v Superman and Deadpool.

These were followed by The Revenant, and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Partly made in Ireland, Star Wars: The Force Awakens was the ninth most-searched movie, despite premiering in 2015.

Google declined to say how many times the top-trending searches were used in Ireland, but head of Google’s News Lab in Ireland and the UK, Matt Cooke, said the diversity in the top 10 shows how political events have dominated the zeitgeist, how celebrities touched our hearts, and how sport continues to unite us.

Other than the big soccer tournament of the year, the Olympics and Ireland’s defeat of the All Blacks, other rugby, golf, American football, and tennis events kept GAA topics outside the most-searched sports events. These also included UFC and Conor McGregor, the third-most searched famous male, after Steven Avery (subject of the Making a Murder documentary), and Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen playing Dublin last May

Hillary Clinton was the most-searched woman, followed by Prince Harry’s girlfriend Meghan Markle, and Stephanie Davis. In fifth place, professional boxer Katie Taylor was the highest-ranked Irish woman in a list dominated by celebrities on reality TV shows, such as Angie Bowie, Lisa Snowdon, and Carol Vorderman.