It’s that time of year. The time of year when the world falls in love, like the song goes, and when the tech giants start rolling out the year-end lists comprised of all the weird, oddball things we all searched and asked for this year.
This leads to interesting revelations, like the fact that ‘World Cup’ was the most-searched phrase via Google Search worldwide this year, as we told you a few days ago. And now it’s time to take a peek at the extremely weird questions many of you were asking Amazon’s digital assistant Alexa this year.
For starters, almost 130,000 people asked Alexa to explain what Fortnite is. You know, that little gaming franchise that topped $1 billion in sales this summer. A franchise that exploded from 40 million users in January to 200 million by the end of November. That’s the one Alexa had to define in 2018 for a group of users roughly equivalent to the size of a small town.
This is all in good fun, of course, but now that we’re done ribbing those of you who needed that explanation, here are some other quirky Alexa asks from 2018, per research from the Alexa team.
My ears were recently assaulted by that monstrosity of a song colloquially known as the Baby Shark song. If you haven’t heard it, consider yourself lucky. This year, Alexa customers listened to a whopping 60 years’ worth of that audio insanity. For your reference, here’s a YouTube link to the tune, which has somehow managed to rack up more than 2 billion views:
Moving on. This is probably as good a representation as any for the kind of year 2018 turned out to be, but almost half a million people asked Alexa this year either “What year is it?” or “Where am I?”
‘Tens of thousands’ of customers also asked Alexa to tell them some kind of good news or something happy to make them feel better. And given the season we’re now in, we should also note, “How many days until Christmas” remains one of the top-asked questions to Alexa this year, according to the Alexa team.
