This is the latest edition of the Google Trends newsletter, with a focus today on local Year in Search.

West Coast

  • Salinas, California was one of two areas with “road closures near me” as the top trending “near me” along with Santa Barbara, California

  • Colorado Springs, Colorado and Fairbanks, Alaska were the two metro areas searching most for the Hogwarts Legacy computer game.

Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world action RPG set in the world first introduced in the Harry Potter books. Embark on a journey through familiar and new locations as you explore and discover magical beasts, customize your character and craft potions, master spell casting, upgrade talents and become the wizard you want to be.

Experience Hogwarts in the 1800s. Your character is a student who holds the key to an ancient secret that threatens to tear the wizarding world apart. Make allies, battle Dark wizards, and ultimately decide the fate of the wizarding world. Your legacy is what you make of it. Live the Unwritten.

  • Las Vegas, Nevada was the top metro area searching for “casinos” in 2023

Midwest

  • The Alpena, Michigan area searched most for Lake Huron in 2023.

Napier Shelton takes us on a journey as he spends a year at his family’s cottage on the lake. Having visited Lake Huron for over thirty years, Shelton weaves family memories into his evocative and informed account of the seasons on this great lake. In 1995, Shelton spent a year at the cottage more fully exploring Lake Huron and its varied shores. He writes about Native American fishing rights, small towns, the fearsome ice, and the migration of birds. He follows the seasonal changes of life in the water. We accompany him on commercial fishing boats, a research vessel studying lake trout, and a Coast Guard icebreaker. We experience the travels and tragedies of venturers on Lake Huron over the past four centuries.Huron is pleasurable reading for any student of natural history or the Great Lakes region, or for anyone who has ever spent time at a summer cottage or wished to do so.

  • Cleveland-Akron, Ohio was the top area searching for corned beef sandwiches

  • Minneapolis, Minnesota was among the top five areas searching “lazy girl jobs”

The South

  • The Savannah, Georgia area was searched most for the plant Spanish moss

  • Sherman, Texas and Knoxville, Tennessee were the two areas searching most for “Kelsea Ballerini tour”

  • The Charleston, South Carolina area searched most for the Ashley River in 2023

East Coast

  • New York, New York was the second top area searching most for Ice Spice in 2023

  • The Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area was searching most for “Bruce Springsteen tour”

Bruce Springsteen’s America

The People Listening, a Poet Singing

In this compelling book, Robert Coles, the celebrated Harvard professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author, turns his attention to popular music legend Bruce Springsteen, and to the powerful impact Springsteen’s work has had both on the lives of his audience and on this country’s literary tradition. Coles places Springsteen in the pantheon of American artists—Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Dorothea Lange, and Walker Percy, among others—who understood and were inspired by their “traveling companions in time,” the ordinary people of their eras.

With wisdom and a unique personal perspective, Coles explores Springsteen’s words as contemporary American poetry, and offers firsthand accounts of how people interact with them: A trucker listens to “Blinded by the Light” during lon…

  • Hartford & New Haven, Connecticut was the top area searching for “Yale vs Harvard”

Published December 12, 2023

Local Year 2023 in Search Special

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