Cape Town - The high-profile Oscar Pistorius trial was the most searched-for South Africa news topic in the world this year, according to a Google review.
The search giant released its yearly roundup of topics that people wanted to know more about this week after analysing “trillions” of searches in the past 12 months.
Google reported that the Paralympian’s trial, which was streamed live on South African TV, was the eighth most searched-for global news story.
The most popular news search term was “Ebola”, followed by “Isis” and “Malaysian Airlines”.
The trial was the top news search in South Africa, ahead of Ebola in second place and the general elections in third.
In September the High Court in Pretoria found Pistorius guilty of culpable homicide for shooting his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp dead at their Pretoria home on February 14, last year.
A month later he was sentenced to five years in prison.
It was not only South Africans who followed the trial closely.
It was the sixth most searched-for news item in the UK, a place behind “celebrity photo hacking” and four places lower than “Luis Suarez Bite”.
In Ireland it was seventh, one place behind “Ebola”.
While the trial featured prominently in top news searches of English speaking countries, it was less popular elsewhere.
It did not feature in the top 10 news searched for in Germany or France, for example, whose most popular news stories were the Soccer World Cup 2014 and “airplane accident” respectively.
The lists of top searches for the US did not have a news category, meaning it is unclear where the Pistorius trial would have featured.
Another high-profile South African trial this year – that of businessman Shrien Dewani – did not have nearly as much impact as that of Pistorius.
Earlier this month the Western Cape High Court discharged and acquitted the Briton of the 2010 murder of his wife, Anni.
He soon returned home.
His trial, however, despite prominent local media coverage, did not even make the list of the top 10 most searched news items within South Africa.
Weekend Argus