Searching for Science

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Europe is the continent that goes the most to Google with science-related questions. To celebrate the search engine’s 25th birthday, we invite you to explore how these questions are connected to each other. Keep scrolling and take a trip through this constellation of knowledge!

In 2019, the first picture of a black hole ever taken was released. Europeans flocked to Google with many questions. Below, you can see some of them.

Whenever a big scientific breakthrough happens, people run to Google for answers. Using these and other questions, we could track how Europeans travel from one scientific topic to the other. In the process, we created the night sky you are seeing now.

Each of the brighter stars (icon drawn) on the night sky you see is a scientific concept – either a larger-than-life breakthrough, such as generative AI and nuclear fusion, or smaller, science-class homework topics such as gravity and the human body.

Notice how each star is connected to many others, forming over a hundred constellations. These links show how people, when searching for one concept, often end up asking questions about others topics as well.

To understand this better, let’s take a look into the star representing the term “black hole”.

Just after asking questions about black holes, Google users also asked questions about Messier 87, the galaxy in which the black hole captured in the 2019 picture was located. This is why they are connected, as part of a same search constellation.

The same happened for the other topics surrounding the main star, such as NASA, gravitational waves, photograph, Earth and event horizon.

You can now explore these search constellations using data from your country, and see how it compares to the rest of Europe.