Google reveals top GIF search trends of 2019

Mad? Frustrated? Confused? These are the most popular GIFs we used to express ourselves this year.

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Steven Musil

Dec. 3, 2019 9:00 a.m. PT

2 min read

Grr was the most popular GIF of 2019.

We've come a long way since the salad days of internet communications, when we used abbreviations such as LOL or keyboard emoji to help put a happy spin on our messages. As with all things internet, the way we express ourselves to others online has become more sophisticated, with animated GIFs replacing keyboard shorthand.

Thanks to GIF generators, anyone and everyone is making their own animated art, flooding the internet with billions of GIFs and making it almost impossible to stay on top of the most popular GIFs to share. To pinpoint the most popular GIFs of the year and try to get a better picture of the year in GIFs, Google used its GIF search engine to identify the top trending GIFs and search terms of 2019.

As Google notes, GIFs are a great way to gage not just what people are saying, but how they're saying it.

Google said it's been working on this since its acquisition of GIF-sharing service Tenor last year. While Tenor powers GIF search in Google products such as Google Images and other apps such as WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook, among others, this list was created using data from Tenor's GIF Keyboard iOS app.

Here are the most popular GIFs shared in 2019 based on aggregate, anonymized data culled from Google's GIF search engine. Be sure to scroll down for a list of the top "slang" GIFs and a holiday GIF gift from Google.