It's that time again — when all kinds of end-of-year lists start appearing in media (sigh). But here's one we actually found interesting:
In three Bay Area cities (Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco) that rely heavily on the public transit service, searches on the phrase BART strike spiked as the top-trending search term of the year.
While such search magnets as celebrity deaths (Paul Walker and Cory Monteith, RIP) and Powerball ranked high, the fact that the uber-newsy BART strike aced out those and the other usual suspects confirmed what we experienced here at KQED News.
Our own coverage of the two transit strikes and a narrowly averted third one generated the heaviest interest among those who follow our regional online news coverage.
Four topics appeared across Google's top 10 lists for all five cities we requested data for -- San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley, Sacramento and San Francisco.