The end of the year is fast approaching. Google has once again released their top trending search terms for the year. And as is my usual habit, here's a post where I attempt to expand on them a little and give some general background for Korea interested folks. Google's blog post is in Korean and provides very little background info, so hopefully this could be a simple helpful introduction for some folks. As always, these explanations are my own personal commentary though I try my best to be as accurate as possible.
So let's take a look at some of these results. Google divided up the results into several categories, including Top Overall, People, K-Pop, K-Contents (TV shows), Movies, Sports, Recipes, AI, and Books. I'm going to focus just on the Overall and the People categories in this post.
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| Google's top Overall and People searches in Korea for 2024 [Google KR] |
These results are mostly boring to be honest. Note that these are the top "trending" searches, not overall searches, so these are topics that received noticeably more attention this year than in previous years. Additionally, as they've done in previous years, they seem to be filtering particularly controversial searches from the public results here. So glance through these boring results before moving on to the slightly more interesting People results.
Google's Top Overall Trending Searches in Korea for 2024
- 올림픽/패럴림픽 - Olympics / Paralympics, held in Paris this year
- 계엄령 - Martial Law - The declaration of martial law, which lasted about three whole hours, will surely turn out to be the biggest blunder of President Yoon.
- 주택 청약 - Housing Subscription - A kind of program by the government utilizing a certain type of bank account (a 주택청약통장) in which people hoping to own a new home can sign up for a lottery system that offers first dibs at new homes, often at prices lower than the market would otherwise reach. Designed to help prevent prices from skyrocketing out of control from real estate speculators, would-be homeowners often get heightened odds by meeting certain criteria, such as first time home buyers, newlyweds, families with children, etc.
- 기후 변화 - Climate change, not sure why this is such a popular search to be honest.
- 미국 대선 - US Presidential election
- 2024 총선 - 2024 general election. While not a presidential election year in Korea, 2024 turned out to be noteworthy for one of the biggest (perhaps THE biggest) defeat by the ruling party in the elections for National Assembly seats, thanks likely to the general unpopularity of the president.
- 파묘 - "Exhuma", a historical thriller horror movie
- 민희진 - Min Hee Jin, the producer of K-pop group New Jeans and newsworthy for reasons discussed below
- 정우성 - Jeong Woo-seung, actor with a surprise illegitimate baby, discussed below
- 폭염- Heat wave. This summer was hot for sure, but looks like it was even worse for Japan.
Now let's move on to the people who gained noteworthy search popularity this year. Here is a small visual guide to help place the names with the faces.
Google's Top Trending People Searches in Korea for 2024
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| Google's top trending people in search in Korea for 2024 |
- 민희진 Min Hee-jin - The CEO of ADOR Entertainment and producer of K-pop group New Jeans. Her surprisingly open conflict with Hybe Entertainment, as revealed in a huge outpouring of Kakao Talk messages, made her a controversial figure this year. Maybe the silliest part of the scandal was the Netizen commotion about her outfit during a press conference (baseball cap and striped shirt) and how that may or may not reflect her management style. Plenty of ink was spilled about her in English on various mainstream news and K-pop focused blog sites.
- 정우성 Jung Woo-sung - Popular and handsome actor, sort of a Leo DiCaprio type who despite his good looks remained unmarried, and like Leo was well known for supporting liberal causes including work with the UN's refugee agency. Popular this year for his role in the political history hit movie "Seoul Spring" (서울의 봄). But we also found out this year that he fathered an illegitimate child with a B-list model on top of apparently other relationships.
- 김수미 Kim Soo-mi - Popular veteran actress, lighting up Korean screens with warmth for 50 years. Lately she was known for her popular cooking shows and products. She sadly passed away this year, many would say too soon even for what was objectively a long and successful life.
- 한강 Han Kang - No, not the river that runs through Seoul, but the author of "The Vegetarian" who received the Nobel Prize for Literature this year. Also worthy of note is her English translator Deborah Smith, mostly self-taught in Korean. If you ask me, that's more impressive than writing a Nobel willing work, frankly.
- 송재림 Song Jae-rim - Popular and handsome actor, relatively young who warmed hearts in dramas like <해를 품은 달> and the fun show <우리 결혼했어요>. Sad news this year as he was found dead at home, presumably from a suicide. While not officially revealed, supposedly this was seen by some fans as a long time coming based on his interactions on SNS and the pressures of so called "saesang fans" (사생팬). While the suicide deaths of female actresses and idols often gets more media attention, the truth is that male actors are no less affected by deranged fans, and the sad end of Song Jae-rim may reveal this yet again.
- 안세영 Ahn Sae-young - Korean badminton player who brought home gold at the Paris Olympics. But probably more than this, famous for her accusations of poor treatment from the management of the Korean sports federation that oversees athletes like her. I'll be honest, I don't understand the ins and outs of her complaint but it seems to be related to some fundamental issues between athletes on the ground and higher-ups; issues like financing, dealing with injuries, etc. Reminds me of the ongoing issues between college athletes and their schools. How much power should each have? Should star athletes be able to have more autonomy, or are they beholden to the organizations that facilitated their rise in teh first place? Probably some echoes of the whole K-pop system here too.
- 신유빈 Shin Yoobin - The cute, young, adorable table tennis player, affectionally referred to as "삐약이" (little chick) for her visuals. Although a rising star athlete in her own right, somehow she seems most famous for her habit of frequent snacking between matches. What was probably just a necessity from hunger and lack of time turned into a heartwarming scene for netizens and viewers, to whom her frequent snacking made her endearing. Not only that, it also landed her several spots in snack food commercials. I've personally seen her about 500 times on the TV screen in my office elevator promoting this or that snack food.
- 티니핑 Teeny Pings - I can't believe they categorized this in the "People" category but here we go. Teeny Pings are some kind of magical fairy dessert creatures, clearly marketed as Pokemon for Girls. If you have a daughter of a certain age (which seems to stretch from age 4 to 24 somehow...) you probably had to buy toys or school supplies of them. You can apparently even watch them in English on YouTube.
- 정몽규 Jeong Mongkyu - Storied member of the Hyundai-owning family of Jeongs, he has been involved in the Korean soccer scene for many years in management roles. This is another area where I don't know enough to make any worthwhile comments, but apparently his extremely hands-on approach has made him an active and engaged promoter of K-Footie at both the national (Korean Soccer Federation) and international (FIFA) levels. Or it makes him a meddling self-serving manager more focused on money and positions for him and his friends, depending on your POV. Again, I don't know much about this. These are just the reactions from my coworkers when I said "Hey by the way, what you think of Jeong Mongkyu?"
- 변우석 Byun Hyunsook - Rising actor with an incredibly handsome face and very tall (189 cm!). Seems like a nice guy who unfortunately got wrapped in an issue of "excessive airport security" (공항 과잉 경호). Somehow the private security team acted like he is the King of Siam or something, shoving the public out of the way, arbitrarily blocking sections of the public exit, even demanding ID checks, none of which is permissible. This is a big part of why Incheon Airport considered, but then backtracked on, establishing a separate celebrity gate.
Interestingly, I've noticed what seems to be controversy filtering in a lot of AI answers for information about these people. If you ask Gemini or Ax about some of the figures mentioned here, even specifically asking about certain issues or scandals, they present pretty sanitized versions or just ignore the request and give generic answers. Searching traditionally for something like 송재림 자실 이유 will bring up mainstream news sites reporting (what are admittedly mostly rumors) about the pressures from deranged fans, but asking AI the same sort of question returns nothing of the kind for me. I wonder if these AI systems are instructed to ignore or to set aside anything related to suicide other than the boilerplate "if you or a loved one are considering...."
Bonus: Top Apps in Korea for 2024
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| Top Apps for Korea 2024 |
You can see more about them at the link, but the one that really caught by eye was Mintit (민팃), which lets you deposit your old cell phones into an AI kiosk that pays you based on its AI inspection of the phone, including brand, model, condition, etc. What a cool way to get rid of some old devices without the hassle or awkwardness of dealing with, you know, a messy human. Maybe I'll look into that more and do a post about it some time.
Another year over
By the way, the top overall K-pop song was "APT" by Rose and Bruno Mars, which is truly a catchy and simple song, combining simple English and Korean lyrics and seems to sample that old "Hey Mickey!" song down to the claps. Perfect recipe for an international K-pop hit. Not to mention Koreans seem to love Bruno Mars anyway. I find that pretty fascinating considering he is notoriously short and yet aren't Korean women supposedly very critical about men's height? Gender studies folks, explain that one for me.
Additionally, while the top AI results was some kind of AI-assisted photo fixer called Pencilizng, the #2 on the list was WRTN, a ChatGPT-like bot site which I previously enjoyed using but have since sort of given up on as newer models from foreign AI bots improve. Maybe I should give it another look.
In fact, it looks like WRTN has adopted the Perplexity style of model of including internet search results (although it's running GPT 4o for its responses), and thus does pull in some data that might be considered slightly more scandalous, such as acknowledging the idea that deranged fans contributed to the suicide of actor Song Jae-rim:
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| WRTN results on Song Jae-rim |
Happy Holidays folks. I'll push out a end of year roundup of interesting links in a couple weeks. Be safe out there.
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