The mass raid on Fifa officials last week prompted a rash of Google queries relating to the scandal, with an intriguing question topping the list.
"What is Fifa?" emerged as the most asked question after the news broke, beating similar queries over how much the body is worth, who owns it, where it is based, and who votes for its president.
Abbi Tatton, manager of global communications and public affairs at Google, wrote on the firm’s blog: "There were more than half a million Fifa searches on Tuesday alone, with a top related question being the basic ‘What is Fifa?’ (perhaps for those that call it ‘soccer’).
"Just as fans of ‘The Beautiful Game’ span the globe, so do searches related to this week’s alleged ugliness. Costa Rica and Uruguay — home to two of the indicted officials — are among the top 10 countries searching for #FIFAarrests."
Seven FIFA officials were arrested last week in a dawn raid on a hotel in Zurich, Switzerland, joining another seven from outside the group being named in a US corruption investigation.
The body has been mired in scandal for some years following repeated newspaper allegations of bribery and graft, particularly in relation to the awarding of future tournaments to Russia and Qatar in 2018 and 2022.
As well as fielding hundreds of thousands of Fifa-related queries Google also saw an influx of requests around deadly storms in Texas in the US, as well as the fictional disasters in Jurassic World, the latest film in the Jurassic Park series due to be released this month.
Alongside the search data Google also revealed that New Yorkers could use Google to find out when the sun sets in their exact location – a feature that tied into the aligning of the sunset with Manhattan’s street grid last weekend, in what is known as Manhattanhenge.
Unfortunately for the search engine the gimmick was scuppered by poor weather, with clouds obscuring the phenomenon over the weekend.
