The young Finnish vocalist Robin was the top search on Google in Finland in 2014. Hip-hop artist Cheek came in right behind him.
Third on the list is last year’s sixth place winner, another young Finnish singer Anna Abreu. Abreu is on a roll this year, as her hit ‘Tomorrow’ with the rap duo JVG was also the most viewed music video on YouTube in 2014.
The topics of sports, television programmes and Ebola were also among the most popular searches.
Over ten billion searches were conducted on Google in 2014.
“The search results can for all intents and purposes be considered the largest poll in the country when it comes to what Finns are interested in. More and more searches are being done in Finland on mobile devices instead of computers,” says Google Finland’s director, Anni Ronkainen.
Spoken searches are catching on
A special feature of searches made from mobile devices is the increasing prevalence of spoken searches, where the user speaks the search word instead of manually typing it into the search word field on the screen.
“The number of spoken word searches has doubled, a strong indicator of increasingly diverse consumer behaviour,” says Ronkainen.
In addition to recording artists, other popular search words in Finland are associated with sports, such as teams in the football league, hockey teams and the Sochi Olympics. After sports, the most popular search has been the deadly Ebola disease spreading in West Africa this year. The widely popular television series ‘Vain elämää (Only Life)’, also focusing on Finnish entertainers, also made the list.
Silja Sundberg, a popular young blogger, beat out Finnish NHL hockey legend Teemu Selänne for fourth place, leaving Selänne in fifth.
“How do I get onto TV?"
Many questions fit in among the most popular searches, as many look for help with their everyday problems. Highest on the list are such inquiries as “How do I get onto TV?” and “What is an orgasm?”
The first foreign name in the list of most popular searches is Robin Williams, the American actor who committed suicide in August. His name also topped all the international Google search lists.
Runner-up foreign personality was the Austrian Eurovision song contest winner and drag queen Thomas Neuwirth, otherwise known as Conchita Wurst, whose performance in May generated lively debate across Europe.
The most googled recipes for 2014 were jams, jellies and marmalades made from rowanberries. The most popular food in 2013, pulled pork, fell to third place in 2014, after the second most popular concoction, a sweet treat from America called red velvet cake.