It’s been quite the year for Caitlyn Jenner – perhaps her best one yet.
Microsoft’s Bing search engine officially announced today that Caitlyn Jenner was the most-searched celebrity of 2015 on the online search engine. She has even beat out her own step-daughter, Kim Kardashian.
Microsoft informed The Advocate that online queries about Caitlyn Jenner composed 78 percent of celebrity-related searches in June. It shot up to 91 percent of queries by October. Additionally, her Vanity Fair cover was the second most-searched celebrity moment in 2015, falling just behind the Duggar family sex abuse scandal.
In the press release by Microsoft, the company said that the searches indicate a major shift in dialogue related to transgender acceptance. Given how public of a figure Caitlyn Jenner is, this change can easily be attributed to the star. The release also noted that Jenner “drove five times more searches than the next closest transgender topic.”
Walter Sun, a principal development manager and data scientist for Bing at Microsoft stated that the increased searches around a topic can “predictive of larger shifts in social mores and cultural competency. … As interest towards a change within a faction of society increases, searches involving language that reflects those ideas tend to increase in number.”
20.8 percent of all United States searches are made using Bing, making the service the second largest search engine in the United States.
Congratulations, Caitlyn!
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