What did South Africans search the Internet for in 2021? Google, which is by far the most popular search engine used in South Africa, has the answers.

The company’s annual “Year in Search” report shows how people used search to find answers to questions.

The top trending search term in South Africa was “Sassa status check”, as people looked for ways, presumably, to check if they qualify for a state welfare grant. Google said this reflects the “impact Covid-19 had on the livelihoods of South Africans”.

The lists also reveal the country’s “uncompromising love of sports and entertainment”, the company said, with searches for “Euro 2020” and “Squid Game”, the Netflix TV series, topping top-10 category lists.

Google Trends, which is used to compile the annual lists, is a tool that displays relative search volume across geographies, time periods and queries that people want to know about. It lets users dive into what’s popular on the Internet, allowing them to compare search data by time, location and between queries.

It also offers category filtering, top and rising searches, and geographic “heat maps”. The main two categories of searches are “trending” and “most searched”. The “trending” queries are the searches that had the highest amount of traffic over a specific period.

These, then, are Google’s top trending searches by South African Internet users in 2021.