Trend of the Day: Solfege
Another post about search trends and NYT Games
If you were doing the Connections puzzle last night, you may have wondered, like me, what the heck Solfege meant.
You weren’t alone! In their quest to figure out what this word was, either during or after the puzzle, many people turned to Google:
To give you a relative scale on that, about as many people searched solfege at its peak as searched for celine during her song at the Olympics (though the persistent interest means there were more searches in the past seven days for celine overall.
The related queries hold some interesting data. Unsurprisingly, many of the people who had questions about solfege also asked for hints, or had questions about libra as well:
Also the fact some also searched fish and alley (not particularly obscure words) indicates to me that some people when they play connections maybe looking up words they know to generate ideas on how they might be grouped. This might also be behind the weird top result of solfege libra as well — not really sure there.
Takeways? Again, nothing big, but stuff I find interesting at least:
Assisting in the solution of word games is a significant use of Google
People that ask for hints in one NYT game are somewhat likely to ask for hints in another
In addition to hints, people use Google during word games to get definitions, and also generate ideas — including in this case by putting words together to see (I think?) if they share any properties.
I’ll probably dig into this again at some point, I find the solfege libra justice search fascinating…