How old is Tom Brady of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? Google releases top Super Bowl LV searches

Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Patrick Mahomes top search charts, but so does curiosity about Roman numerals

Google searches for Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady, pictured here, have surged. AP Photo

How old is Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady? What time is the Super Bowl on Sunday? Which team has never won a Super Bowl?

These are just a few of the questions that are causing a surge in searches related to the Super Bowl LV on Google, according to Alphabet, the search engine's parent company.

Indeed, Brady (he's 43), who has already won the Super Bowl six times, is dominating any searches related to American football's biggest tournament of the year in almost every state but two.

Meanwhile, Missouri and Kansas – home to the Kansas City Chiefs, the team Tampa Bay will be facing off against – are both saturated with searches for Kansas City quarterback Patrick Mahomes.

There's some curiosity about Mahome's age (25), but Google indicates people are also questioning whether or not he is married, as well as how tall he is.

Searches show people who don't necessarily follow American football are demonstrating some basic curiosity, too.

"Buccaneers colours" and "Chiefs colours" are both considered to be breakout searches, according to Google, while there also seems to be some confusion over the Roman numerals used to describe how many Super Bowls there have been (LV, or 54, as of 2021).

"Roman numerals peaks around the Super Bowl each year in the US," Simon Rogers, a data editor for the Google news lab, said.

Search interest in Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Kansas City Chiefs over past week, US. Courtesy Google Trends

Although Brady is dominating Super Bowl-related searches in the US, his team, however, is not winning the battle for Google queries overall. The Kansas City Chiefs come out on top in terms of search curiosity, and it wasn't even close. In fact, it was a landslide victory to the Chiefs, except in New England and Tampa Bay's home state of Florida.

Search interest in quarterbacks: Tom Brady (Tampa Bay Buccaneers) versus Patrick Mahomes (Kansas City Chiefs). Courtesy Google Trends

Although Covid-19 will largely put a halt to the usual parties held across the US during the Super Bowl weekend, according to the Google search data there still seems to be an uptick of searches for Super Bowl snacks and dinner options. 
"Super Bowl food ideas for small groups is a breakout search," wrote Rogers, who also indicated there was a 350 per cent surge in searches for vegan Super Bowl snacks. There was also an 800 per cent spike for searches on "healthy Super Bowl snacks".

Uniquely searched Super Bowl foods, by state. Courtesy Google Trends

The internet search giant has released a map that breaks down Super Bowl food searches on a state by state level.

Sure, there are more traditional items being searched for, such as chicken wings in Michigan, and cheeseburgers in California, but there are also ample searches for wagyu beef in Arkansas, jambalaya in Kentucky and keto egg bites in Montana.

As for the how Google compiled all this data, the company described it as an anonymised and unbiased sample of the "world's largest real-time datasets".

"We take a sample of the trillions of Google searches, because it would otherwise be too large to process quickly. By sampling our data, we can look at a dataset representative of all Google searches, while finding insights that can be processed within minutes of an event happening in the real world," wrote Rogers.

The Super Bowl LV between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Kansas City Chiefs will take place on Sunday, February 7.