Which Turkey is on people’s minds right now—Thanksgiving or the conflict between Turkey and Russia?
It depends on where you live.
At 2:24 a.m. ET on Nov. 24, the Turkish military reported firing on a Russian warplane after it violated its airspace. Google (GOOG) searches worldwide for “Turkey” then spiked between 2:30 a.m. and 4 a.m. after the news broke, and the upward trajectory continued until about 11:00.
A simple Google search for “Turkey” will pull up Google News stories and related tweets about the plane, but it displays images of turkeys. So which search term was more popular?
Searches for the nation of Turkey may have overtaken searches for the bird worldwide, but it was a much different story when filtered for the U.S. Americans are still much more preoccupied with preparing for Thanksgiving this week. For every three people searching for the nation of Turkey at its peak, there were seven people searching for the bird, according to Google Trends. Related searches in North America include the phrases, “turkey brine,” “how to cook a turkey,” and “turkey recipes.”
The interest was short-lived, however. At about 11:15 a.m., searches for both Turkey and turkey began to decline, and the downward slope will likely continue over the next 24 hours.