Awful men are everywhere on Google's 2017 'Year In Search'

Google has released its annual "Year in Search" feature and the ongoing sexual assault and harassment reckoning is front and center.

Perhaps most surprising was the figure at the top of trending search results. Globally, Matt Lauer was at the top, followed by Meghan Markle, Nadia Toffa, Harvey Weinstein, and Kevin Spacey. (The U.S.-only list isn't much different, dropping Toffa and adding Michael Flynn to the top five.)

Lauer, the disgraced former host of NBC's Today show, also appears in the number four spot for overall global search trends (number two in U.S. searches).

On the "actors" list, two other figures in the wave of misconduct allegations, Spacey and Louis CK, appear in the top five globally (same for U.S. searches).

While it's far from the only major story in 2017, what's breathtaking about these results is how the recent reckoning about terrible behavior by men in power came to overtake the news cycle in the final quarter of the year and how, as more allegations surface every day, it continues to grow.

It's notable, too, that Lauer is at the top. One could expect someone like Weinstein to not be nearly as well-known and require a lot of searches. But Lauer was in living rooms on a daily basis as a lead host of Today for 20 years.

His placement at the top of the list suggests not so much that people wanted to know who Lauer was but rather wanted to know more about his story and what it was that he did.

Notable by his absence was our Commander-in-Tweet, Donald Trump. Of course, Trump and his shenanigans are so ubiquitous that, perhaps, there's not as much need to search for everything he does. He just tweets it anyway.

A Google rep confirmed to Mashable that these results were about trending searches versus total number of searches. So don't worry, Donald, people still care about you.

Storms, iPhones, and a pregnant giraffe

Hurricanes also dominated the year-end lists as much as they dominated the news cycles and our oceans. Hurricane Irma was the top search for both global and U.S. users. And Hurricanes Harvey, Jose, and Maria joined Irma on the top global news searches list.

In other notable search results, the iPhone 8 outperformed the iPhone X in both general search and consumer tech searches for both global and U.S. audiences.

And, just to prove that not everything we searched on Google this year was part of the larger dumpster fire of sadness we dealt with, other popular searches included Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman, the Spongebob mocking meme, and even April the giraffe, proving that we will never, ever escape all those hours we spent staring at a webcam.