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August 20, 2025

After 12 months of heady ups and devastating downs, 2017 is almost at an end. To mark the occasion,Googlehas once again collated the top trending search terms over the past year. As always, the results are fascinating to see as they provide a fairly accurate cross-section of the biggest events that hit the news throughout the year.

Let’s start with the top global search results!

Google Year in Search 2017: Searches

The list starts out on a somber note with Hurricane Irma – the devastating Atlantic storm that hit the US states of Florida, Georgia and South Carolina, as well as several Caribbean countries in September.

Apple took second and third with theiPhone 8 and iPhone X, respectively. It’s a bit of a surprise to see the iPhone 8 topping the notch-sporting flagship, but it makes some sense. Up until the X’s announcement, there was a lot of confusion surrounding the name of Apple’s 10th anniversary iPhone. This is reflected by search result trends for “iPhone X” whichspiked in Septemberfollowing the device’s big reveal.

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Disgraced former Today Show host Matt Lauer takes fourth, while Meghan Markle comes in fifth. The actress-turned-campaigner hit the headlines across the world in November when her engagement to Prince Harry, a member of the UK’s royal family.

Netflix’s mega-popular show 13 Reasons Why came in sixth followed by rock musician Tom Petty who died in October, aged 66. “Fidget Spinner”, Chester Bennington, and the Indian National Cricket Team occupied the last three spots in the overall list.

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Google has also split its 2017 search retrospective into a number of categories spanning a variety of diverse topics. I’ll list the most interesting categories at the bottom of the post, but first, let’s take a little look at phones that made it into the “Consumer Tech” global top ten:

Google Year in Search 2017: Consumer Tech

Despite Apple’s overall dominance, Samsung makes a fairly high appearance in fourth with theGalaxy S8. Next up is theNokia 3310in sixth, which just goes to show you how powerful a thing nostalgia can be.

The retro-styled feature phone came in ahead of theRazer Phone(which amazingly came in seventh – a good early sign for the Android newcomer), theOPPO F5,OnePlus 5, andNokia 6, respectively.

Interestingly, the same list for just the US trends has the exact same top four, while the Razer Phone jumps up to fifth ahead of the iPhone 8 Plus (sixth),Google Pixel 2(eighth), andSamsung Galaxy Note 8(tenth).

With that out of the way, below are some of the remaining global categories. If you’re willing to subject yourself to even more lists, you can always head over toGoogle’s 2017 trends pagefor the full results – you can filter them by region too. Here’s to less death and destruction in 2018 and more searches for “How to make slime”.

Google Year in Search 2017: Global News

Google Year in Search 2017: People

Google Year in Search 2017: How to…

Google Year in Search 2017: Movies

Google Year in Search 2017: TV shows

Google Year in Search 2017: Musicians and bands

Google Year in Search 2017: Memes

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