Yesterday’s Super Bowl XLVI heralded the most tweets ever for any sporting event, but the world’s most popular search engine also saw a mass of football-related activity pass through its digital doors.
If Google’s data is anything to go by, it’s not entirely clear whether people were actually watching the game or too busy talking about it online, though in fairness it seems that fans were actually doing both, thanks to their trusted mobile devices.
In a blog post today, Google software engineer Jeffrey Oldham says that 41% of all searches related to Super Bowl ads that were made during the game came from mobile devices, up from 25% before the game.
Overall, the top trending searches on Google during the game were: Madonna, Halftime show, Patriots, Tom Brady and Giants.
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The Giants vs. the Patriots match was the the first ever Super Bowl to be live-streamed, and it seems the public were clambering to find where, exactly, the match was being streamed.
Searches peaked at kickoff, and were made predominantly on desktop, followed by mobile phones and then tablets. Searches for the Spanish language version of the stream made the list of top trending queries.
The Giants may have claimed a narrow victory in the match, but it seems that the Googling-public preferred to search on all-things Patriots, with the team’s quarterback Tom Brady scoring the most searches out of all the players. So, all-in-all a big day for Brady, though he’s probably more content with the fact that he broke Joe Montana’s record for the most touchdown passes at a Super Bowl.
The famous Super Bowl adverts – costing a pretty penny for companies willing to pay for a prime-time slot during one of the the world’s most watched sporting events – were viewed more than 30 million times on YouTube in the days leading up to the event itself.
But the on the day of the Super Bowl itself, searches were 122 times higher on the same time the previous week. The most popular commercials in terms of Google searches were ads from Acura, GoDaddy and M&M’s.
Meanwhile, here’s Google’s infographic on how the Super Bowl fared online.
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