Today is Friday, and that means we often do things differently. You might be someone for whom the arrival of the weekend means getting ready to go out and party, or maybe you’d rather settle down to an evening of A Question of Sport and Would I Lie to You? In either case, your behaviour on this day tends to differ to other weekdays.
Did you know that the terms we Google vary from day to day as well? Using Google Trends, we can see how a search term increases, decreases or fluctuates in popularity over a certain period of time. If we look at performance over the last 30 or 90 days, it becomes notable that some terms jump as the weekend approaches, often reflecting societal behaviour and popular culture.
Here are three terms that people tend to search for more often on Fridays than any other day of the week:
1. Rebecca Black
American singer Rebecca Black burst on to the scene in late 2010 with an extremely catchy/annoying song, and thanks to that particular hit, she still enjoys a surge of internet searches on one particular day of the week.
Of course, the song in question was ‘Friday’.
The song was generally not popular with critics. Yahoo! questioned whether it could be the worst song ever, while a Time article described it as “hilariously dreadful”. Nonetheless, the video went viral and Google searches indicate that it still remains embedded in our heads when Friday comes. And it will now be in your head for the rest of the day too – sorry about that!
2. Top of the Pops
Staying on the theme of music, Fridays in my youth used to be heavily associated with the phrase “it’s Friday, it’s 7:30, it’s still number one, it’s Top of the Pops!” Perhaps I shouldn’t reveal that my youth actually goes back far enough to remember when the programme was shown on Thursdays before being shifted a day forwards.
It’s now more than a decade since Top of the Pops ceased to be a Friday night ritual in 2006, but generally, more people still search for it on a Friday than any other day. The huge recent spike was on Christmas Day, with TOTP now being just a once-a-year broadcast.
Today, you can still happily waste away a few hours watching vintage TOTP clips on YouTube, savouring the time before the music charts became the excruciatingly bland, reality TV-driven calamity they are today.
3. Mosque
Another search that sees higher volumes than usual on a Friday is for the Muslim place of worship.
In Islam, it’s customary to visit mosques on Friday afternoon, which explains this weekly growth in people perhaps looking for their local one or searching for an unfamiliar one they plan to visit.
Other searches I thought might jump on Fridays include the band The Cure (for their hit ‘Friday I’m in Love’) and the chocolate bar Crunchie (due to its old ‘Friday feeling’ advertising campaign), but with both, there is no notable pattern from one day to the next.
What do you tend to search for on Fridays? Why not head to Google Trends and see if you’re in good company?
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