MOUNTAIN VIEW, CALIFORNIA — Perhaps you’ve never heard of them, but high-technology company “Google, Inc.,” has a fairly popular service they provide to Internet users — a search engine for finding the collected knowledge of our species and also “side-boob” pictures. Google announced this morning that they had to add additional servers to handle the extra search load from one term in particular — the lyrics and melody to the “Canadian National Anthem.”
“Although this is America and some people searched for ‘Canada’s Theme Song,'” Google Deputy Assistant Media Liaison Michelle Fisher told the media at a press conference this morning, “there is an undeniable, huge spike in searches for the lyrics and melody of the Canadian national anthem in the last few days.”
In fact, Fisher says engineers at Google have pinpointed the exact moment the spike in searches started.
“When Donald Trump was officially nominated for the presidency by the Republicans,” Fisher reported, “the searches for things related to Canada just skyrocketed. People were searching for the quickest routes into Canada, the Canadian immigration website, and of course searches for the lyrics and melody to Canada’s national anthem. The load requests were so voluminous we had to add six hundred more dedicated servers just to handle U.S.-originated searches for all things Canada.”
While she said it’s not in her job description to analyze the data in the searches, Fisher did say the surge in searches tied almost perfectly into when Trump won the primary.
“I can’t speculate as to why people are engaging all these searches,” Fisher said, “but clearly something is making a whole lot of people really, really interested in moving to Canada.”
Trump is currently leading the Republican field in most Super Tuesday state polling, and Fisher says that means people who use Google’s search engine service should expect a possible drop in performance if they are searching for anything even tangentially related to Canada.
“People are clearly gearing-up for a major move out there,” Fisher said, “so it doesn’t matter if you’re looking up The Kids in the Hall, poutine, or Canadian rules football. If it’s in any way related to Canada, you may have longer than expected search times. We’re certainly doing everything we can to mitigate that chance, but the closer we get to the conventions, if Trump is still leading the GOP pack, you might see wait times of several hours to days for Canadian-centric searches to complete.”
Fisher also advised that even if Trump drops out that Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio could drive similar search spikes.
“If you care at all about living in a country where religious freedom applies to more than just Christians, or where corporations aren’t people,” Fisher said, “then you might be searching for Canadian things regardless of who wins the GOP nomination. So users should sit tight if they’re searching for anything related to that country for at least the next few months.”
