Every year, Google releases a Year in Search film that looks back on the people, topics, events and places that captured the world’s attention. 2017 was undeniably a challenging, divided year, with trillions of searches that reflected that. The brief was to find the trends and themes that brought us together globally as people. Search trends showed 2017 was the year we asked ‘how,’ a theme subsequently woven throughout the searches and footage, sourced from the real footage of the highs and lows of 2017. The success: over 18 million views and 180k likes on YouTube.

Through collaboration with the Google Trends Team, analysis of the year’s data shaped the narrative for a film that recaped the year of 2017. From trillions of searches, the most trending topics during 2017 were isolated. From there, an analysis across topics yielded a profound trend: people were searching ‘how’ like never before. Using ‘how’ as the backbone for our film, we gathered footage from news and online sources around the world to help tell our story. We kept track of moments in culture throughout the year and continued to add moments as they happened. Because Google search is powered by the world’s curiosity, we used the searches themselves to power the narrative. The familiar Google interface and search bar helped viewers see the brand story in what people searched and served as a bridge between beats in the film. An instrumental version of Harry Styles’ ‘Sign of the Times’ provided the film’s emotional bedrock and audio clips from the found footage helped tell the human story even further. The film ran on TV and in Cinema, but more importantly we found our global audience on Social and YouTube where it earned over 18 million views and 180,000 likes.

For 2017, Google’s Year in Search served as a mirror back to the world’s collective experience. And it resonated, garnering over 18 million views on YouTube and over 180,000 likes with media coverage all over the globe. The results indicated a shared human mission of understanding and a desire for action, with Google Search being the platform people turn to when they need answers to both. Once again, the film cemented Google as a company that reflects all of the people that use it.