'Squid Game,' Alec Baldwin among top Google searches for 2021

San Francisco, United States — Google reported Wednesday its most popular search terms in 2021 include "Squid Game," "Alec Baldwin" and the cryptocurrency "Dogecoin."

Sports were also big on the platform. The top eight search terms had to do with cricket, the NBA and international football tournaments like Euro 2021, Google said.

The wildly popular and uber violent Netflix series "Squid Game", a South Korean-made survival game about people desperate to get out of debt, came in ninth position.

The American actor Baldwin, who accidentally killed a cinematographer on the set of a film in October with a loaded gun, was the most frequently looked-up personality on Google.

He beat out Kyle Rittenhouse, the young American recently acquitted in the shooting deaths of two people during an anti-racism demonstration in Wisconsin in 2020.

As for news categories, the term Afghanistan, which the Taliban seized in August, and vaccines against Covid-19 were among the most commonly searched terms.

But people also looked up stock-related terms such as GameStop, an electronics company that was the target of fevered buying, and cryptocurrencies like Dogecoin and Ether.

In the deceased persons category people often looked up the name Gabby Petito, a young American killed while traveling across the country with her boyfriend.

As was the case in 2020, questions about the pandemic dominated the search traffic on Google but this time queries about vaccines surpassed those regarding Covid-19 tests.