Kiwis searched for slime, sport and spaghetti bolognese in 2017


2017 was an action-packed year for New Zealand. We won the America’s Cup. We elected a new government. We kept a close eye on world news and events, but found time to try new things at home. We lost some truly amazing people, but celebrated the true heroes among us. To see the year off in style, here’s a wrap of the top trending* searches brought Kiwis together in Search.

Kiwis searched for slime, sport and spaghetti bolognese in 2017


2017 was an action-packed year for New Zealand. We won the America’s Cup. We elected a new government. We kept a close eye on world news and events, but found time to try new things at home. We lost some truly amazing people, but celebrated the true heroes among us. To see the year off in style, here’s a wrap of the top trending* searches brought Kiwis together in Search.

On top of the world

New Zealand’s victory in the America's Cup in Bermuda put the country back on top of the yachting world, and put the tournament high on our trending search list this year. True to form, we also spent a lot of time checking out other major sporting events like the Lion’s Tour and the Melbourne Cup. The highly addictive fidget spinner came in at number three, spinning its way into our hearts, hands and searches for much of the year.

Democracy and disasters

The General Election led our news searches in 2017, undoubtedly the biggest news moment of the year with almost 80% of enrolled Kiwis turning out to vote (how to vote was also a very popular search term in 2017). We were also preoccupied with wild weather events that wreaked havoc here and abroad, from hurricanes and cyclones to flooding and fires.

Politicians and other public figures

Half of our top ten trending Kiwis this year were politicians. New Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern came out at number one, while interest in her partner Clarke Gayford also put him on the list. We also searched for our favourite sports legends, including Peter Burling, Jerome Kaino and the late All Black Sione Lauaki.

Honouring the departed

We mourned the loss of some greats this year, too. John Clarke, the Kiwi behind the cultural icon Fred Dagg sadly passed away. Other legends we said goodbye to included Silver Fern and international netball player Tania Dalton, singer-songwriter Tom Petty and actor John Hurt.

How do you make slime, anyway?

Our top ‘how to…?’ searches for 2017 show we were completely obsessed with making slime, with four of top ten trending searches related to this sticky endeavour. But just to show we can be serious too, ‘How to vote in NZ’ took the number two spot, while the popularity of ‘how to cook pork belly’ proves we were keen to keep mixing it up in the kitchen. We also asked some pretty eclectic questions, with topics ranging from cryptocurrency to kimchi. And fidget spinners, just for good measure.

Meat makes a comeback

 Our top recipe searches show our love affair with meat dishes continued in 2017. Beef stroganoff, pulled pork, lamb shanks and spaghetti bolognese all tickled our taste buds throughout the year, joined by other non-meaty favourites like hot cross buns, pikelets, and the perennial Year in Search classic, pancakes!

And that’s just a preview. To dive into the top trending terms of the year, check out New Zealand’s full trending lists*:

Overall searches

  1. Lotto result NZ
  2. America's Cup 2017
  3. Fidget spinner
  4. Election NZ 2017
  5. NZTA road closures
  6. Cyclone Cook
  7. All Blacks vs Lions
  8. Melbourne Cup 2017
  9. North Korea
  10. Daylight savings 2017

News

  1. Election NZ 2017
  2. NZTA road closures
  3. Cyclone Cook
  4. North Korea
  5. Hurricane Irma
  6. Christchurch fire
  7. New Zealand flooding
  8. London fire
  9. UK election
  10. Cyclone Debbie

Global People

  1. Harvey Weinstein
  2. Ed Sheeran
  3. Bruce Springsteen
  4. Pippa Middleton
  5. Kevin Spacey
  6. Gal Gadot
  7. Floyd Mayweather
  8. Jake Paul
  9. David Cassidy
  10. Bruno Mars

Kiwis

  1. Jacinda Ardern
  2. Winston Peters
  3. Bill English
  4. Jerome Kaino
  5. Peter Burling
  6. Jaylene Cook
  7. Clarke Gayford
  8. Sione Lauaki
  9. Metiria Turei
  10. Todd Barclay

Loss

  1. Tom Petty
  2. Chester Bennington
  3. Tania Dalton
  4. Hugh Hefner
  5. Bill Paxton
  6. Carissa Avison
  7. Rich Piana
  8. John Clarke
  9. John Hurt
  10. Dan Vickerman

Sporting events

  1. America's Cup 2017
  2. All Blacks vs Lions
  3. Melbourne Cup 2017
  4. Wimbledon 2017
  5. World Masters Games
  6. Bathurst 2017
  7. Rugby League World Cup
  8. Mayweather vs McGregor
  9. US Open 2017 tennis
  10. Australian Open 2017

How to…?

  1. How to make slime
  2. How to vote in NZ
  3. How to make a fidget spinner
  4. How to make slime without borax
  5. How to make fluffy slime
  6. How to delete Instagram accounts
  7. How to make slime without glue
  8. How to lose weight
  9. How to draw a dragon
  10. How to cook pork belly

What is…?

  1. What is Black Friday 2017
  2. What is typhoid
  3. What is bitcoin
  4. What is kimchi
  5. What is the time
  6. What is a fidget spinner
  7. What is botulism
  8. What is borax
  9. What is a cyclone
  10. What is MSG
Recipes

  1. Hot cross buns
  2. Beef stroganoff
  3. Pikelets
  4. Spaghetti bolognese
  5. Yorkshire pudding
  6. Pancakes
  7. Pulled pork
  8. Slime
  9. Anzac biscuits
  10. Lamb shanks
To rediscover the events, people and topics that defined 2017 around the world, watch our video here.




Posted by Camilla Ibrahim, Communications and Public Affairs Manager, Google Australia and New Zealand

 * Trending Searches: What was hot in 2017? The "trending" queries are the searches that had the highest spike in traffic over a sustained period in 2017 as compared to 2016.

Google has long supported the Digital Technologies Curriculum in New Zealand to equip and inspire students. The Digital Technologies Curriculum focuses on computational thinking and computer science to provide students with the opportunity to develop skills needed for the jobs of the future.
Google has long supported the Digital Technologies Curriculum in New Zealand to equip and inspire students. The Digital Technologies Curriculum focuses on computational thinking and computer science to provide students with the opportunity to develop skills needed for the jobs of the future.

Our annual CS educator professional development (PD) grant program (formerly known as CS4HS) is designed to increase access to CS education by funding computer science professional development programs for educators and support them in the curriculum implementation. More than 9,000 educators in Australia and New Zealand have benefited from training by expert PD providers dedicated to growing the confidence and skillset of new and future CS educators.

Today, we’re excited to announce our 2018 funding cycle is open to universities, schools and nonprofits around Australia and New Zealand. Applications will close on the 2 March 2018. To learn more about the application process head to the website.

The impact of PD grants for educators

Tracy Henderson from the University of Canterbury and Julie McMahon from the New Zealand Association for Computing, Digital and Information Technology Teachers identified an opportunity to ensure equal access to CS for students and teachers in rural communities in New Zealand. With their CS educator grant, the CS4PD program created by Tracy and Julie established regional CS Professional Development (PD) hubs in the North and South Islands of New Zealand to ensure all teachers are given the opportunity to engage with CS.
CS Professional Development hubs were created in the North and South Islands of New Zealand with the help of a CS educator grant 
In 2017, the team hosted a three-day workshop for 55 teachers from primary, secondary intermediate schools across New Zealand where teachers were introduced to the proposed new curriculum along with accessible, hands on training to run PD for teachers back in their regions. The primary goal for Julie was to “be inclusive of all regions and all types of schools and in particular it was important that our Maori Medium teachers present felt valued and their mana embraced by everyone present”.

The workshop was a huge success, with 2018 PD plans in the works that include the creation of a resource depository for teachers to access through New Zealand. Tracy says, “We concluded the week with inspired teachers ready to help support other teachers within their regions and schools to implement the new Digital Technologies curriculum in 2018".

Posted by Sally-Ann Williams, community and engineering outreach manager, Google New Zealand



2017 was the year Kiwis embraced te reo, applauded homegrown comedy and danced to the dulcet tones of Ed Sheeran. From ping pong to memes to making light of mean tweets, Kiwis looked to laugh, play and jam all year long. As we wind down the year, it’s time to sit back and celebrate the videos that defined 2017. #YouTubeRewind is our annual roundup of the YouTube videos that trended over the last 12 months, according to time spent watching, sharing, commenting, liking and more.


2017 was the year Kiwis embraced te reo, applauded homegrown comedy and danced to the dulcet tones of Ed Sheeran. From ping pong to memes to making light of mean tweets, Kiwis looked to laugh, play and jam all year long. As we wind down the year, it’s time to sit back and celebrate the videos that defined 2017. #YouTubeRewind is our annual roundup of the YouTube videos that trended over the last 12 months, according to time spent watching, sharing, commenting, liking and more.

New Zealand’s Top Trending Videos of 2017


 For the first time, two of New Zealand’s top 10 videos of the year were in te reo Māori: Maimoa Music’s hit single Wairua and a cover of the classic waiata Tiaho mai rā by Jessica & Tiana Waru. Kiwi comedians Jono and Ben made the top trending list with their satirical take on the viral kids interrupting BBC interview clip. Our love of singing in cars continued in 2017, including a take on Tennessee Whiskey, and James Corden’s phenomenally popular Carpool Karaoke series. Along the way we also celebrated an extraordinary ping pong trick victory, marvelled at a ventriloquist – and joined in on political mash-ups.





New Zealand’s Top Trending Music Videos

 Our list of top 10 music videos for 2017 is a mix of mega hits and pop classics. We were clearly hooked on Ed Sheeran, with ‘Shape of You’ making two appearances in the top trending music list. From the breezy island beats of Luis Fonsi’s Despacito to Taylor Swift’s self referential Look What You Made Me Do, Kiwis kept the volume up and the music playing on YouTube throughout the year.



New Zealand’s Top Emerging Channels

For the first time, #YouTubeRewind also examined the growth of local channels to unearth the top 10 Trending Kiwi YouTube Creators for 2017. Up and coming Kiwi YouTube channels in 2017 included a bunch of serious console and PC gamers, music and crafts to keep the little ones happy. It also includes a rundown of the coolest smartphones and tech gadgets on the market, and some hilarious recorder music fails.

Stay tuned to see the YouTube’s Rewind video, celebrating the top memes and moments of the year from around the world!

Posted by Camilla Ibrahim, Communications & Public Affairs Manager, YouTube Australia and New Zealand

As the CEO of YouTube, I’ve seen how our open platform has been a force for creativity, learning and access to information. I’ve seen how activists have used it to advocate for social change, mobilize protests, and document war crimes. I’ve seen how it serves as both an entertainment destination and a video library for the world. I’ve seen how it has expanded economic opportunity, allowing small businesses to market and sell their goods across borders. And I’ve seen how it has helped enlighten my children, giving them a bigger, broader understanding of our world and the billions who inhabit it.
As the CEO of YouTube, I’ve seen how our open platform has been a force for creativity, learning and access to information. I’ve seen how activists have used it to advocate for social change, mobilize protests, and document war crimes. I’ve seen how it serves as both an entertainment destination and a video library for the world. I’ve seen how it has expanded economic opportunity, allowing small businesses to market and sell their goods across borders. And I’ve seen how it has helped enlighten my children, giving them a bigger, broader understanding of our world and the billions who inhabit it.

But I’ve also seen up-close that there can be another, more troubling, side of YouTube’s openness. I’ve seen how some bad actors are exploiting our openness to mislead, manipulate, harass or even harm.

In the last year, we took actions to protect our community against violent or extremist content, testing new systems to combat emerging and evolving threats. We tightened our policies on what content can appear on our platform, or earn revenue for creators. We increased our enforcement teams. And we invested in powerful new machine learning technology to scale the efforts of our human moderators to take down videos and comments that violate our policies.

Now, we are applying the lessons we’ve learned from our work fighting violent extremism content over the last year in order to tackle other problematic content. Our goal is to stay one step ahead of bad actors, making it harder for policy-violating content to surface or remain on YouTube.

More people reviewing more content
Human reviewers remain essential to both removing content and training machine learning systems because human judgment is critical to making contextualized decisions on content. Since June, our trust and safety teams have manually reviewed nearly 2 million videos for violent extremist content, helping train our machine-learning technology to identify similar videos in the future. We are also taking aggressive action on comments, launching new comment moderation tools and in some cases shutting down comments altogether. In the last few weeks we’ve used machine learning to help human reviewers find and terminate hundreds of accounts and shut down hundreds of thousands of comments. Our teams also work closely with NCMEC, the IWF, and other child safety organizations around the world to report predatory behavior and accounts to the correct law enforcement agencies.

We will continue the significant growth of our teams into next year, with the goal of bringing the total number of people across Google working to address content that might violate our policies to over 10,000 in 2018.

At the same time, we are expanding the network of academics, industry groups and subject matter experts who we can learn from and support to help us better understand emerging issues.

Tackling issues at scale
We will use our cutting-edge machine learning more widely to allow us to quickly and efficiently remove content that violates our guidelines. In June we deployed this technology to flag violent extremist content for human review and we’ve seen tremendous progress.

  • Since June we have removed over 150,000 videos for violent extremism.
  • Machine learning is helping our human reviewers remove nearly five times as many videos than they were previously.
  • Today, 98 percent of the videos we remove for violent extremism are flagged by our machine-learning algorithms.
  • Our advances in machine learning let us now take down nearly 70 percent of violent extremist content within eight hours of upload and nearly half of it in two hours and we continue to accelerate that speed.
  • Since we started using machine learning to flag violent and extremist content in June, the technology has reviewed and flagged content that would have taken 180,000 people working 40 hours a week to assess.

Because we have seen these positive results, we have begun training machine-learning technology across other challenging content areas, including child safety and hate speech.

Greater transparency
We understand that people want a clearer view of how we’re tackling problematic content. Our Community Guidelines give users notice about what we do not allow on our platforms and we want to share more information about how these are enforced. That’s why in 2018 we will be creating a regular report where we will provide more aggregate data about the flags we receive and the actions we take to remove videos and comments that violate our content policies. We are looking into developing additional tools to help bring even more transparency around flagged content.

A new approach to advertising on YouTube
We’re also taking actions to protect advertisers and creators from inappropriate content. We want advertisers to have peace of mind that their ads are running alongside content that reflects their brand’s values. Equally, we want to give creators confidence that their revenue won’t be hurt by the actions of bad actors.

We believe this requires a new approach to advertising on YouTube, carefully considering which channels and videos are eligible for advertising. We are planning to apply stricter criteria, conduct more manual curation, while also significantly ramping up our team of ad reviewers to ensure ads are only running where they should. This will also help vetted creators see more stability around their revenue. It’s important we get this right for both advertisers and creators, and over the next few weeks, we’ll be speaking with both to hone this approach.

We are taking these actions because it’s the right thing to do. Creators make incredible content that builds global fan bases. Fans come to YouTube to watch, share, and engage with this content. Advertisers, who want to reach those people, fund this creator economy. Each of these groups is essential to YouTube’s creative ecosystem—none can thrive on YouTube without the other—and all three deserve our best efforts.

As challenges to our platform evolve and change, our enforcement methods must and will evolve to respond to them. But no matter what challenges emerge, our commitment to combat them will be sustained and unwavering. We will take the steps necessary to protect our community and ensure that YouTube continues to be a place where creators, advertisers, and viewers can thrive.

 Posted by Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube