IF YOU WANT to take the temperature of a nation, you could probably do worse than checking its collective internet history.

Now, while we can’t do exactly that, Google has issued their annual ‘What’s everybody in Ireland Googling?’ press release and, in news that will surprise nobody except maybe Peadar Tóibín, we remain incurably curious about the weather.

The extratropical cyclone Storm Éowyn remained the most popular search term in Ireland this year despite making landfall all the way back in January. As it turns out, we were concerned not only with the devastating effects of the storm, but the finer details too, as ‘How to pronounce Éowyn’ clocked in as the third-most searched for ‘How to’ term. This tells us two things: that not enough people in Ireland have seen the Lord of the Rings movies, and that some people may have been planning to negotiate with the storm and didn’t want to provoke its wrath further by saying its name wrong. 

Naturally, one of the most popular search queries of the year was ‘What is 6 7?’ — an inquiry that refers to a memetic phrase which grabbed the attention of children and teenagers across the world this year. 

Older people were left scratching their heads as to what the cryptic numerical phrase could possibly mean, demanding to know the significance of the two numbers, and what was so funny about employing them seemingly at random and with no explanation. Of course, the reality is that old people aren’t supposed to understand the humour of young people, and it would benefit us greatly as a society if Google had responded to all such queries with a gentle, “just let it go, man”, kind of message. 

Other searches included things like ‘Dubai chocolate’ and ‘What are tariffs?’ and ‘How to become best digital-only columnist in........

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