Coronavirus, deaths; Sri Lanka’s popular Google search topics

COLOMBO (News1st): Coronavirus had topped the list of Sri Lanka's rising search topics on Google in 2020, while the frequency of searches with the term “death” grew by 90 percent than last year, official data show. Search terms such as “coronavirus” and “coronavirus update” had recorded breakout levels, exceeding 5000 percent than 2019, according to the global search engine. They had been popular - hitting 100 on the Google scale - between March and April when the pandemic first broke out in the country, but has dipped drastically since then. Google data shows that pandemic related searches were popular in the Northern, Eastern, Central, Sabaragamuwa, Southern and Uva provinces. The term “death" was among the rising search topics and had been at its peak in March and April. It had been often used to learn about the COVID-19 death toll. Users had also googled the term to gather updates on the deaths of actors Sushant Singh Rajput, Chadwick Boseman, and Irrfan Khan, US basketball player Kobe Bryant and Argentine football player Diego Maradona. The deaths of notorious local underworld criminal “Makandure Madush”, and the suspected demise of North Korean leader Kim Jong Un - before his public return - were also on that list. Another popular search term associated with “death” was the Bubonic plague, often compared to the COVID-19 pandemic for its symptoms. Details of the plague had been widely browsed in the Central, Western, North-Western, and Southern provinces, but had not been popular in other regions. Other rising search topics included the Lanka Premier League and Indian Premier League cricket tournaments, and the US presidential election. On the list of top searches, terms such as "song" and "gossip" had figured to a greater extent.