U.K. citizens voted Thursday on whether to leave or stay in the European Union (EU), and Google Trends noted a search spike for the phrase “What Happens If We Leave E.U.” two hours after the polls closed at 10 p.m. London time.
Britain voted to leave the EU at 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent in the Brexit vote. Within a couple hours of the polls closing, Google saw a 250 percent spike in global searches for “What Happens If We leave The E.U.?,” according to an article published by The Verge Friday.
+250% spike in “what happens if we leave the EU” in the past hourhttps://t.co/9b1d6Bsx6D
— GoogleTrends (@GoogleTrends) June 24, 2016
Those searching Google for answers on the complex issue were not alone.
“Something as complicated and multi-faceted as Britain’s membership of the EU … should not have been decided by referendum,” Rich McCormick wrote for The Verge. “Instead weighed up by independent experts versed in the thousands of ways the UK interacts with the biggest economic power on Earth.”
“But as the proponents of the Leave campaign repeatedly argued, UK citizens had apparently ‘had enough of experts,'” he wrote.
“What is the E.U.?” was another phrase that saw a search spike, according to The Mirror. The British tabloid notes that the trend at least appears troubling prima facie,”The data paints a grim picture of an uninformed public that seems to have no idea what it just voted for.”
There was also a major spike in searches for “How To Emigrate” after polls closed, evidence of the fact many in the U.K. obviously did not want to leave the E.U..
Quite a spike in people searching for ‘How to emigrate’ in the past 12 hours. Strange that… @GoogleTrends pic.twitter.com/AvfUsI871a
— John Brenan (@jwbrenan) June 24, 2016
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