What a peculiar couple of weeks it’s been.

At the end of January friends of mine who live in China were in Cape Town to visit family and friends during Chinese New Year holiday, and I remember asking them about this virus - not fully grasping what they were describing. Fast forward 2,5 months, and my life, and the whole world around me has changed.

I’m quite deep in the trail running and outdoor community, and flipping through social media, it’s been really fun to see how everyone’s keeping themselves busy. Races and routes are now replaced with recipes (of which 99.9% are of banana bread). Ha! Sharing screenshots of Houseparty and Zoom is a thing. My Strava feed is packed with garden and driveway runs. And who knew that half of all the runners I know secretly have road bikes and wind-trainers.

So, I decided to do some digging on Google Trends to see if these changes are evident on Search. The results are awesome! Flip, I love Google Trends :)

Work From Home Trends

South Africa

Worldwide

Travel Trends

11 March: Trump announces travel ban
14 March: UAE announces travel ban and stops processing visas. Emirates starts to suspend flights to certain countries.
23 March: UAE grounds all flights for Emirates and Etihad
23 March: Ramaphosa announces lockdown
27 March: South Africa’s lockdown starts

South Africa

Worldwide

Social Media

Inserted this graph to illustrate the volume of searches the big three get in comparison to any of the newer platforms. I removed them from the subsequent graphs to get a better view of Twitch, Houseparty and TikTok.

South Africa

Worldwide

Hobbies

South Africa

I added ‘hand sanitizer’ to the graph here to see if the increase in ‘recipe’ searches was in any way correlated with ‘hand sanitizer’ searches. But, it doesn’t seem that way. Could it be that all those ‘recipe’ searches must are food related?

What are people looking for when they search for recipes….?

*Dalgona, aka: TikTok Coffee, is a style of coffee made by whipping equal proportions of instant coffee, sugar and hot water until it becomes creamy and then adding it to cold or hot milk. It’s South Korean, but popularised by TikTok, hence the name: TikTok Coffee.

Worldwide

Interesting to see that the bumps in global recipe searches happen on weekends.

What are people looking for when they search for recipes….?

More weekend bumps! Pretty evident that most people around the world are not in lockdown. They still go to work, practice social distancing, and use weekends for house-bound recreational activities.