Ready, set, search! As the world converged on Paris in Summer 2024 for the big games, we wanted to celebrate our users and the things they love, through the lens of the world’s most searched sports trends. So we set out to build an unmissable campaign via one of Google’s most visible channels — the Google Doodle. Through the Most Searched Playground: Paris 2024, users searched to uncover 20 of the most searched sports, French icons, and moments from the Games’ history.
We wanted to building off the prior year’s success, where we celebrated the Most Searched people, icons, and events in Google history. This time around, the Most Searched Playground launched a new experience to showcase the most searched athletes, sports, cultural icons of Paris & the 2024 summer games.
Our concept was to build an interactive world where people could search and uncover 20 of the most searched sports, French icons, and moments from the Games’ history, from football and break to croissants and Daft Punk. Users launched the experience at the front doors of Google — via special Paris 2024 Google Doodles, the Google Search app, and owned social channels. Clicking any of these promos transported users to a one-of-a-kind Paris-themed scavenger hunt park, where a variety of clues led users to find the clues hidden in a huge maze of activity.
And just like its predecessor the year before, this year’s Playground was full of easter eggs and special sidequests. In addition to the 20 official “most searched” elements in the puzzle, users could search for 10 mythical figures from ancient Greece, or drop into the arcade area to play 2 mini games: Birdie Baller and Squawk Drop.
To pull this ambitious work off, our team worked closely with an illustration partner to create 2000+ unique individual characters and moments. It was important that the world feel rich and diverse, so that everyone could see themselves reflected in the world we were building.
Our team also created the overall UX/Design of the game experience. We wanted to create a game that was intuitive and easy to play for all users and all abilities. One of our challenges was to make sure that people who use screen readers would be able to enjoy the game too. Working alongside our trusted testers, we customized the game’s alt-text and created unique sound clues that triggered as you navigated closer to hidden moments.
The Most Searched Playground immersed people in a world of beloved most searched sports and French culture icons, and gave them an opportunity to have some fun, garnering 123 years of cumulative engagement time and over 85 million most-searched objects found.
An impressive 55+ million users joined in on the fun (2.2X vs. the previous year’s user count), dedicating an average of 2 and a half minutes to the experience, while nearly 2 million people found all 25 objects. Notably, more than half of all users were from outside the United States, which speaks to the worldwide appeal of the playground and the most searched concept.
600K+ users played at least one of the secret sidequest mini-games (one user played Squawk Drop 670 times in one session). The high scores for Birdie Baller and Squawk Drop were 590 and 2,137, respectively(!)
