By all accounts, 2016 has been a tough year. For evidence, look no further than Google’s search statistics.
According to the search engine’s annual Year in Search statistics, Googlers around the world were particularly concerned about America’s Drumpfster fire as well as the death of musical legends Prince and David Bowie. While the top two search spots still went to more lighthearted queries – Pokemon Go and the iPhone 7 – news around the world has been particularly distressing this year, from the conflict in Syria to the Zika virus to Brexit to drug violence in the Philippines and the passing of other internationally known greats like Leonard Cohen and Muhammad Ali.
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In Vietnam, too, the news has been rough – the combination of climate change and El Niño did a real number of the country’s environment this year, from drought in the Mekong Delta to rising seas in Binh Thuan province to an epic flood in central Vietnam, never mind the high-profile Formosa scandal and several other pollution cases in both northern and southern Vietnam.
And yet, if you take a look at Vietnam’s most popular Google searches in 2016, the country’s top spots display a bit more optimism or, at the very least, lightheartedness. According to Google’s Vietnam-specific data, the country’s top queries included mobile game Slither, the Euro 2016 football competition, Pokemon Go and Son Tung M-TP’s hit “Chung ta khong thuoc ve nhau”. In domestic news, Vietnamese Google searches included the passing of Hanoi’s beloved Hoan Kiem turtle but also Obama’s visit to Vietnam and the country’s first-ever Olympic gold medalist, Hoang Xuan Vinh.
Take a look at Vietnam’s 10 most popular queries in 2016:
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[Infographics via Google]
