And what is happening on the other side of the world? Using Google Trends and exploring what people from the Philippines were looking for online on Monday April 18th, we discovered the most trending topics were related to scandals. The top position in the list was for “Amber Heard”, Johnny Depp’s wife, who was sued by Australian authorities for illegally introducing her pets into the country, violating the biosecurity laws. In the third position and after the second most trending topic “DZMM”, Philippine’s flagship radio station, we found another scandal, “Jacqueline Hamill Story”. Rodrigo Duterte, candidate for the country’s presidency, was condemned after he joked about a murdered Australian rape victim, Jacqueline Hamill. Another trending topic for that day was “Japan Earthquake 2016”.
Lots of things happened in 2015, but what are the specific terms that were most searched by the Filipinos? We see a clear trend here, with the terms “AlDub”, the supercouple that stars in a popular national soap opera, “Alden Richards” and “Maine Mendoza” (the actors that form the couple) in the first positions. Maine Mendoza is best known for her viral Dubsmash videos, and actually we also find the term “Dubsmash” on the top of the list, with “Pope Francis”, “FIBA Asia 2015” or “Fifty Shades of Grey”.
Going deeper into this, we can classify the most popular searches for 2015 into different categories. For instance, the most popular news in the country were related to Pope Francis, the APEC Summit 2015, the Paris attacks and the ISIS. The events with that created the largest buzz were the FIBA Asia 2015 and again, the APEC Summit 2015. Regarding female personalities, we can highlight the actress Maine Mendoza or celebrity Caitlyn Jenner, and for the male ones, Pope Francis or actor Alden Richards.
The most searched song for the year was Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud”, and the most searched movie was “Fifty Shades of Grade”. “Pangako Sa Yo” was the TV show that Filipinos looked for the most on the internet, and Dubsmash the most searched App. Sundowners Vacation Villa was Filipino’s preferred local vacation destination, while the Vatican City (and Las Vegas!) was their international choice.
Year 2015 saw three topics clearly outstanding from the rest: on the podium’s top position we find “Paris under attack”, which had more than 897M searches, followed by “Mayweather vs. Pacquiao fight” on the second position with over 216M searches and “Star Wars” with more than 155M on the third.
We thought it could be also interesting to play with some groups of terms and see which of them create the highest interest among the Filipinos. Concerning education, it seems Master degrees and Post Graduate programs are not very popular. Searches related to School and University have been decreasing since 2005, with seasonal fluctuations inside the year and with most of the searches concentrated on the most populated and developed cities in the country such as Manila, the capital, Quezon City or Makati.
In the food category we chose “cheese”, “chorizo”, “wine” and “hummus”. It seems that Filipinos don’t like neither chorizo nor hummus, and it’s interesting (and logical!) to see that except for a peak around 2006, interest in wine follows a similar evolution than interest in cheese.
Among pop, rock, opera and jazz, we can observe that rock is the most preferred music style in the country. While interest in jazz music has been pretty stable since 2005 until today, pop is growing in popularity so it’ll probably catch up rock in a few years. Opera started gaining popularity from 2008, but it started declining again in 2013. It’s curious to see that interest in music is mostly concentrated on the Northern regions in the country, were the largest and most developed cities are located.
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