The most Googled terms and words of 2022

Yahoo Finance Live anchors Seana Smith and Dave Briggs look at the most searched terms, people, and trends on Google in 2022.

Video transcript

DAVE BRIGGS: Johnny Depp, Will Smith, Amber Heard, the three people you'd least like to appear at your Christmas party, also the most searched for names in 2022, according to Google's year-end search for 2022. For the most searched for word of the year overall, though, we should technically give you six guesses. We will not, but it is Wordle. Purchased by "The New York Times" earlier this year, this was easily the most searched for word all year long.

And the economy was clearly on the mind of the masses. One of the words looked up the most in terms of its meaning was recession. A lot of economic questions were googled this year, Seana, including, how do I buy bonds? What is a bear market? Why is gas so expensive? How do I get student loan forgiveness? Tells you a lot about the shape of the economy as a whole.

SEANA SMITH: It does, and it's a little bit worrisome. And I also just think that this just speaks-- when you take a look at this list, I thought it was very accurate when you take a look at some of the biggest trends and what we have seen play out over the last 12 months. I was a little bit skeptical when I first heard that Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most searched for terms. But when you take into account, I guess, how popular that Netflix show was, it makes a lot of sense.

Wordle, on the other hand, it's going to be interesting to see how much that's going to take effect, like, how much influence that's going to have in 2023, because I would make the argument it started extremely strong out of the gate. I think if you ask people how often they play Wordle today compared to how much they played it during the first six months of the year, that number, I would think, has fallen off the cliff.

DAVE BRIGGS: I would love to find out--

SEANA SMITH: You play it.

DAVE BRIGGS: No, I've played it once or twice in my life, but I have a daughter and her mom sit on the couch every morning, and it is a ritual. You're right, though. It probably fades away, like most things. I was going to guess that the most searched for name of the year-- but I guess he got a late start on it-- SBF. I thought Sam Bankman-Fried. Even though it's only been a couple of weeks, when you think about the implosion of FTX, I thought that would dramatically, just in those couple of weeks together, would rise to the top. But I'm guessing it has for the last--

SEANA SMITH: It would be interesting if they could break this down month by month. Then you could really dissect everything that's been going on.

DAVE BRIGGS: One thing I can add that they're looking for is, how do I become a aviator, a flight pilot. They think that it was "Top Gun" that led to that.

SEANA SMITH: Interesting. Interesting. All right, well, we can keep going on this for hours and hours, but we've got to leave it there.