Google's top tech searches in 2015: iPhone 6s, Samsung Galaxy S6, and Apple Watch
Just like every other company on the planet, Google puts together end-of-year lists for its various properties. But there's only one that matters more than all the rest: Search.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google's end-of-year Search list is best read alongside what actually happened next: iPhone 6s and Galaxy S6 had spent September being compared spec-for-spec, and Google's own trend data crowned both — plus the first-generation Apple Watch — as the tech queries of 2015.
The list's limits show up quickly in the follow-on record. Months later, [[a:871578|Kantar found Samsung's Galaxy S7 outsold Apple's iPhone 6s in the US between March and May 2016]], meaning the year's most-searched phone was not the year's top seller. And when the DOJ's antitrust case pried open Google's internal data, the top queries by revenue for a week in September 2018 again featured the iPhone — showing how the same device names sit on both the consumer-interest and advertiser-monetization sides of search.
First-order effects
- Apple and Samsung each exit 2015 with a free, third-party-validated demand readout: their flagships defined consumer tech curiosity for the year, with Apple Watch adding a new category to the list in its launch year.
Second-order effects
- The mismatch between search rank and sell-through — iPhone 6s topped Google's list while Galaxy S7 won US units in spring 2016 per Kantar — pushes analysts and marketers to treat trend lists as early intent signals rather than market-share forecasts.
Third-order effects
- Query-level rankings have become strategically sensitive data: Google's own disclosures in the antitrust case revealed iPhone among its top revenue-generating queries, and a decade on, Apple still takes 7 of the top 10 spots in global smartphone sales rankings — the same two companies anchoring both the search-interest and sales ledgers.
The trend: Consumer search behavior has served as a durable proxy for flagship-device demand from the iPhone 6s era through the iPhone 16 era, even as search-versus-sales gaps keep the two measures distinct.