It seems people are looking for love, faith, peace, marriage, and children—literally.
The five words are among Bible Gateway's top 25 queries of the year.
The online scripture resource has released its 2014 Year in Review report, wherein it lists the most searched-for terms during the year.
At number one is the perennial favourite, "love." According to Bible Gateway content manager Andy Rau, the term was the most popular query for 200 out of the 365 days of the year. The keyword also placed at number one in the Spanish language searches.
"Love" is followed by "faith," "peace," "hope," and "joy." Other entries in the list include "marriage" and "children," which have taken the seventh and thirteenth spots, respectively.
According to the Christian Post, Rau stated in his analysis of the 2014 report that "there's a personal and devotional sense to many of these search terms which may echo the Bible in American Life Report's findings that most Bible readers look to Scripture to find answers to personal challenges and big questions in their lives, rather than for political or 'culture war' purposes."
Be that as it may, certain trends and events in 2014 have also clearly affected what people searched for in the Bible. The release of the Darren Aronofsky movie "Noah," for instance, led to a spike in searches for biblical passages about the Old Testament figure.
Bible Gateway tweeted after the film's opening weekend that "[visits] to the #Noah story in Genesis 6-9 ... saw a 223% increase," earning "Noah" a place in the website's 15 most searched-for keywords.
Aside from listing the most popular queries of the year, Bible Gateway also identified the top verses of 2014. Ranking at number 1 in the US, Canada, UK, and Australia is John 3:16: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life."
By basing their year-end report on 1.5 billion page views by over 150 million unique visitors from December of last year to November of this year, Bible Gateway offers a glimpse of how people "engaged with the Bible" in 2014.
