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As South Africans headed to the polls on Wednesday, many of their burning internet search queries had to do with the Economic Freedom Fighters, DA leader Mmusi Maimane and where their nearest voting station is.
Google collected data on the top searches related to the country's general elections through its analytics website, Google Trends.
The term "South Africa elections 2019" drew the highest number of searches and queries, according to Google Trends, with more than 500 000 searches. "Elections 2019" was a distant second with over 50 000 searches by 23:00 on Wednesday evening.
As far as parties go, the EFF notched up the most search queries with 20 000. More than 10 000 searches were logged for "voting stations near me".
With more than 20 000 searches logged, "IEC results" showed that South Africans were as interested in getting early indications of the election results as they were to vote.
Data trickling in to the IEC’s results centre in Pretoria show the ANC at an early lead nationally and in all provinces, save for the Western Cape where the DA is in the lead.
In the week leading to elections and during the course of Wednesday, "who to vote for" was one of the top election-related questions South Africans asked on Google.
The fifth most frequent question before the end of Election Day was whether the EFF would win the election, followed by the question "who will win the election?".
While the number of election-related searches on Google sounds impressive, the search giant processes more than 40 000 search queries globally every second, translating to more than a billion searches each day.
Find everything you need to know about the 2019 National and Provincial Government Elections at our News24 Elections site, including the latest news and detailed, interactive maps for how South Africa has voted over the past 3 elections. Make sure your News24 app is updated to access all our elections coverage in one place.
