Perhaps they were hunting for somebody comfortingly irrelevant as a counterpoint to their cripplingly on-trend subject matter.
Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo was the top trending subject on Twitter after the first Sunday of the new NFL season.
Meanwhile, Dan Scavino, an assistant to the President, celebrated that #Roseanne was the top trending subject of the evening, tweeting, "So awesome!!!" Watching the show or not watching it, or liking it or not, seemed a matter, suddenly, like everything else, of taking sides.
A later photo of a bus on fire travelled still further as #TottenhamRiots became the service's top trending subject, with users trying to find out news, updating others on whether they had arrived home safely, and even passing on calls for "legal observers" to head to Tottenham.
It may be absurd the attention the world has given to the reality TV star's new hair colour, but it seems to have become a trending subject worldwide as the 34-year-old sat on the front row of Balmain's show sporting her edgy new look.
The multiverse is a trending subject of investigation among cosmologists and theoretical physicists.
The trending subject is an Instagram post that's being attributed to Franco in which the actor appears to have lashed out against a prominent theater critic.
I signed onto Facebook this morning and, to my shock, the trending subject was that Starbucks has decided to have plain red holiday cups, instead of their more traditional Christmas-themed and decorated cups.
The method is tested by the stochastic generation of cell culture trends subject to simulated observation error to ensure that identified systematic errors are independent of measurement uncertainty.
Real-time chronology, trending subjects, and curated news feeds mean that the Internet, with its mix of individual expression and automated sorting, writes the first draft of the eulogy.
His ill-tempered exchange with a Kenyan Twitter user who had urged him not to extend his stay in office spawned a hashtag #someonetellkagame, which was one of the top trending subjects in Kenya.
