Google Searches For “My Eyes Hurt” Increase After Eclipse
According to Google Trends, some of you people aren’t too bright (pun intended). Why? Because Google searches for “my eyes hurt” exploded during yesterday’s amazing eclipse. It was a generational celestial event for sure, but that doesn’t mean people were very smart about it.
A quick glimpse at Google trends from yesterday afternoon, the afternoon of the eclipse, shows that searches for problems with people’s eyes took a really big jump. As you can see from the screen grab below, “my eyes hurt”, “eyes hurt”, and “why do my eyes hurt” took big leaps yesterday in the middle of the 3pm hour.
I thought that just about everyone on the planet knew that you shouldn’t look directly into the sun. Even if you sang a hit song about how joyful that could be… “But mama, that’s where the funnnn issss!” There were plenty of rumors of the dangers of an eclipse. Many of those rumors turned out to the total bunk. But that “protect your eyes” thing? That one is real.
Then there are these two idiots:
One peek at social media yesterday from 9am until 2:30pm and you’d have seen a lot of people in various Facebook communities searching for local stores that still had eclipse glasses in stock. A lot of local stores had sold out, but plenty still had stock even while the eclipse still in it’s beginning phase. I shot over to the 7/11 across the street from the radio station and they were more than happy to take my $5.83 for a pair of eclipse glasses.
As an interesting aside, did you notice that there was a moment during the eclipse where there was enough cloud cover to safely view the eclipse with the naked eye? I thought that was a pretty cool moment. So, yeah… For a quick moment I became one of those idiots who were looking at the sun without eye protection! Well, at least I didn’t have to search google for “my eyes hurt” after the whole event wrapped up.
As for that pair of almost six dollar eclipse glasses? What will you do with them now? If I counted up all the minutes that I actually wore those glasses and broke it out by the hour, I think I paid about $364 an hour for them. The last thing I want to do with them is throw ’em out. Did you know that you can recycle them? Click here for that info on how to recycle your eclipse glasses.
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