The top searches in the 1st hour of 2015
This post was created to get an idea of what questions were in people’s heads at the very start of 2015.
Data
It’s not possible to know what every search on the internet was during the first hour of 2015. So a proxy was needed.
Given that Wikipedia entries are often very near the top of search results, the publically available page view statistics from this site were used. These show the number of times a Wiki page was viewed in a given hour.
Top 10 Results
(no. of page views shown in brackets)
- Adam Lambert (21,793) - Queen (the band) had their own TV show on BBC1 for New Year’s. It looks like I wasn’t the only person wondering who was singing in Freddie Mercury’s place.
- Wikipedia:Your first article (16,369) - Is this a New Year’s Resolution thing? - “No.1 Exercise; No.2 Write something on Wikipedia”?!
- Mobile Launcher Platform (15,432) - A NASA device for space launches.
- Gulf War (13,824) - This relates to the First Gulf War (1990-‘91).
- Edward Herrmann (9,785) - This US actor passed away on December 31st.
- John Deacon (8,395) - The ex-Queen bassist.
- Billboard 200 (8,282) - Checking which album was US number one in 2014?
- Queen (band) (6,993) - another Queen search.
- Brian May (6,390) - Queen’s lead guitarist.
- Auld Lang Syne (5,925) - People wondering why that song is always sung?
(*Note that these results include English language page views stats from all over the world for the hour after midnight (GMT); they are not just for the UK and Ireland but given the time it could be assumed that many of the results are from these two countries.)
It looks like Queen’s BBC1 show did wonders for their good showing in the results - searches related to the band accounted for 4 of the top 10 results. There was no sign of the artists on Jools Holland’s Hootenanny which was on BBC2 at the same time.
Image from @DianaKat1. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Technical details…
The Wikimedia log file for the hour after New Year (GMT) was downloaded here (“Page view statistics for Wikimedia projects”).
It was then loaded into a Linux virtual machine where the terminal and 'grep’ command were used to search through the log file’s 5.9M records. This search looked for all lines that started with 'en_’ (entries related to English language Wikipedia pages) and ranked them in order of popularity (page views).
Three humdrum results were removed from the top 10 shown above (Main_Page, Special:HideBanners, Special:Search).