- Thousands of people searching for The World Cup simultaneously caused search records to be broken on multiple platforms such as Google and Twitter.
- Multiple CEOs of different companies comment on the game including Twitter CEO Elon Musk, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and Apple CEO Tim Cook.
- Google and Twitter’s willingness to adapt to the needs of their users causes them to become the go-to news platforms for people.
Google surpassed all prior search records on December 18, 2022, during the FIFA World Cup final, which Google CEO Sundar Pichai called “one of the greatest games ever”. He added that Google had its highest traffic in 25 years when a considerable amount of people searched for The World Cup at the same time.
Multiple CEOs express enthusiasm
Not just Google experienced heavy traffic during the World Cup final; Twitter saw the highest number of tweets per second (24,400 tweets) for World Cup after France’s goal, according to Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s tweet.
24,400 tweets per second for France’s goal, highest ever for World Cup!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 18, 2022
Joining Pichai and Musk, Tim Cook, CEO of Apple also commented on the World Cup final, saying it was “one of the greatest games” he has ever seen.
One of the greatest games I’ve ever seen. Congratulations Argentina!
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) December 18, 2022
Implementing new features
In order to further establish itself as a trusted source of up-to-date information, Google released a number of new features before the first match, including adjustments to “World Cup” search results. Google made it possible to search for the list of upcoming games and even receive notifications for them. As of now, upon searching for “World Cup 2022”, you can see all the results clearly and enjoy the celebratory firework animations provided by the search engine.
Twitter’s trends, or “hashtags”, made it possible for people to see what was being talked about the most and encouraged them to join thousands of people talking about the same thing, which made it the platform to talk about The World Cup around the world.
Here are the top five moments throughout the entire tournament that, as calculated in Tweets per minute (TPM), produced the highest peaks of Twitter conversation:
- Argentina vs France, Final. End of the penalty kicks, Argentina wins the World Cup.
- Argentina vs France, Final. Mbappé equalizes with a strike.
- Croatia vs Brazil, Quarterfinals. Brazil misses the last penalty kick. Croatia moves to the semi-finals.
- Argentina vs France, Final. Di Maria scores for Argentina. 2-0.
- Croatia vs Brazil, Quarterfinals. Neymar scores. Brazil takes the lead in the 106th minute.
Not only football fans were talking about The World Cup. As the events on the field took place, a number of brands also joined the discussion. Among the sponsors of the event that received the most international attention were Adidas, Budweiser, and Hyundai.
sunday? no… we got a family thing 🐐 pic.twitter.com/Pm6IrkH7hz
— adidas (@adidas) December 13, 2022