Disney Plus, Baby Yoda, and Area 51 top Google's year-end most-searched lists

If genre fans thought the internet was finished with Baby Yoda this year, they thought wrong. In fact, the internet has been so obsessed with The Mandalorian breakout baby that The Child (the character’s real name) topped one of Google’s “Year in Search” lists, along with its show’s streaming home, Disney+.

The streamer was the most-searched trend in the U.S. during 2019, towering over a list that includes the late Riverdale star Luke Perry, top-grossing film of the year Avengers: Endgame, and Game of Thrones’ high-profile fantasy finale. Disney was unmatched (sorry, Apple TV+) in its search engine optimization, as its films topped Google’s movie list — Endgame, Captain Marvel, Toy Story 4, and The Lion King composed four of the top five — and its character topped one very specific category.

Beating out babies like earworm Baby Shark, the royal baby, and “Kim Kardashian Kanye West baby,” Baby Yoda was the leader of the youth — at least in terms of Google searches. The meme-dominating, cast-and-crew-decimating, too-adorable-to-live creature came late in the year, which makes its victory all the more impressive.

Genre was a strong shower all across the board, however, with the rest of the top ten movie searches including Joker, IT Chapter Two, Frozen 2, Midsommar, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. In fact, the only non-genre film in the top ten most-searched list is Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. 

TV showed much the same, with Game of Thrones beating out Stranger Things for the first two slots and The Mandalorian, The Umbrella Academy, and The Boys following closely behind.

However, one of the more amusing categories Google tracked was the “What is...?” section. Atop this list of curious Googlers’ results is the question spawned by one very silly meme from earlier in the year: What is Area 51? While the secretive facility may or may not contain UFO evidence, the snowballed joke to raid Area 51 certainly stirred up interest in the otherworldly this year.