Popular searcher on Google for 2017

There's no mincing words: 2017 was one hell of a year. It's hard to fathom how it's even humanly possible that everything that happened this year occurred in just 12 calendar months, but from politics to entertainment to weather phenomena and global tragedy, it all happened, and we've all got lots of feelings about each and every event that affected our lives. What better way, then, to measure the year that was than by examining the words we searched for the most on the internet?

That's the thinking behind Google's annual Year in Search report, which examines all of the data gathered throughout the last 365 days and ties it all up together with a nice neat bow (and, naturally, a list of what we searched for most). It's here that you'll see why it is that 2017 was the year that we asked "how" far more than anything else — and see how it shaped the way that each and every event went down. Not sure what that means? Ahead, witness the top stories of the year in one hell of a year-in-review video — and be sure to scroll through to read some of the most riveting parts of this year's study on US searches in easy-to-digest list form.