Philly couldn’t stop Googling Taylor Swift, “The Last of Us,” I-95 collapse, and more in 2023

When Spotify Wrapped, the yearly review of the music app’s most-listened-to artists and songs, became available to Philadelphians last month, to no one’s surprise Taylor Swift was the most listened-to artist in the city (and the world). Now, a new review of this year’s top search engine results shows she was also the most searched “tour” in town, too.

Google has released its annual “Year in Search” review of the most-searched key phrases in 2023 in the world. It even goes a step further to show the top local searches for a given area, including Philadelphia. In no particular order, we’re looking back at this year’s results and their impact on local news.

Besides Taylor Swift, Philly was clamoring to find info on tour dates for Beyoncé, Drake, Ed Sheeran, the Jonas Brothers, SZA, and Zach Bryan. When it comes to news coverage, though, no two names shined brighter than Beyoncé and Taylor Swift.

When Swift came to the Linc for a three-night stop in Philly, for every three Swifties that came for the show, one came just to hang in the parking lot of her “Eras Tour,” reported The Inquirer’s Emily Bloch and Kasturi Pananjady. Swifties even came from across the country to swarm a small Kutztown record store for rare copies of a Folklore album recording session on vinyl. And yes, we’ve covered the Taylor and Travis romance (if you can’t tell, there are eight articles linked).

In an opinion piece for The Inquirer, Naiymah Sanchez, a self-described “proud transgender BeyHive Philadelphian,” wrote about her experience through decades of Beyoncé fandom and how her lyrics accompanied Sanchez through love, breakups, and reclaiming her power. When Queen Bey kicked off the U.S. leg of her “Renaissance Tour” in Philadelphia in July, Inquirer critic Dan DeLuca described the superstar as “indomitable,” performing a spectacular set for her “significantly queer, impressively diverse, sequin-clad, and bedazzled cowboy hat-wearing audience.”

While there isn’t much of a local angle to this series, one television show caught many in a chokehold and became the most trending TV show in the city: HBO’s adaptation of the popular zombie apocalypse video game, The Last of Us.

During the show’s first season run, The Inquirer’s Emily Bloch highlighted the third episode’s centering on the romance between characters Bill and Frank. Bloch wrote, “In the video game’s storyline, Bill is a minor character and his relationship with a man is a small aside. In the TV adaptation, a tender, heart-wrenching love scene marks the plot’s turning point.” The show has been praised by LGBTQ gamers and viewers.

There was also a 2023 study that found that the King of Prussia Mall would be a viable survival hideout in the event of a Last of Us-esque zombie outbreak.

The City of Brotherly Love and Sisterly Affection also needed a palate cleanser from top-tier zombie drama to vicariously find romance through ABC’s The Golden Bachelor, a reality dating show featuring contestants all over 60.. Contestant Susan Noles even lives a half-hour from Philly in Aston.

This saucy show spurred The Inquirer’s Al Lubrano to catch up with older Philadelphians and health professors to discuss how feelings around romance and sex don’t change that much when we age, or as Lubrano puts it, “some flames blaze on, constant as a pilot light.”

One Philly story in particular rose to international attention: the I-95 bridge collapse.

In June, a tanker carrying gasoline caught fire underneath I-95 and collapsed a portion of the highway. The Inquirer raced around the clock to provide coverage of the 12-day rebuilding period for the interstate highway that carries more than 150,000 vehicles daily. From explainers to a frame-by-frame rundown of the recovery, Inquirer reporters, editors, and producers were on top of the news. (Even covering the livestream one Philly developer created to the tune of LoFi beats.)

Another topic that caught fire was Philly’s air quality. In the same month as the I-95 collapse, smoke from a Canadian wildfire blanketed the city in a thick, dark, fog-like cloud for days. The city’s health department declared the air quality so bad that it was “unhealthy to breathe.” Pet owners and dog walkers said they struggled , and we ran down the risks that come with breathing wildfire smoke. Meanwhile, Inquirer photographers captured the scenes of wildfire smoke hovering over Philadelphia, to eerie and dystopian result.

Many of you were feeling Red October year-round, trying to hit a few Schwarbombs of your own at a local batting cage, seeing as Philly was the only place in the U.S. with “batting cages near me” as a top trending search.

There was also some interest in nearby aquariums, which was most likely the city’s next-door neighbor, Camden’s Adventure Aquarium. This year, a giant Pacific octopus, named Charlie, was gifted to Adventure Aquarium only for staffers to discover that the cephalopod was missing half of its third right arm. Charlie’s doing OK and just laid eggs, according to the aquarium.

Philadelphia Eagles’ Haason Reddick, who grew up in Camden and attended Temple University, hosted Camden families recently at Adventure Aquarium for the third annual “Lucky Christmas” event. Families had dinner with Reddick, walked throughout the aquarium, and played games. Check out Inquirer photojournalist Heather Khalifa’s photos of the event.

Other takeaways from top-trending searches in Philly include the phrase “near me,” as in “pawn shop near me” and “plasma donation near me.”