Every year Google publishes some of the most popular searches of the year and 2023 was no exception. Called “Year in Search”, the 2023 dashboard shows not only the most searched news, but also categories such as news, people, actors, movies, deaths, songs, TV shows and so on. Besides showing the global trends, those interested can also filter the searches by country to see what their close peers were more interested in over the course of 2023.
This being said, the review also includes the most popular searches on other google platforms besides the regular search engine, such as YouTube or Google Maps. So below are the most searched museums on Google Maps in 2023.
1. Louvre Museum, Paris, France
The glass pyramid of the Louvre Museum has become an iconic landmark of Paris. With 7.8 million visitors in 2022, the most visited museum in the world, in one of the most visited cities in the world, it’s not a surprise that the Louvre was the most searched museum on Google Maps in 2023. Art lovers will be having to pay 30% more to enter the Louvre from this year, while prices across the city are bound to rise amid the 2024 Olympics.
2. The British Museum, London, United Kingdom
The third most visited museum in the world in 2022, London’s British Museum is dedicated to human history, art and culture. Its extensive collection includes the Rosetta Stone. Found near the town of Rashid (Rosetta) in the Nile Delta by one of Napoleon’s officers, the stone is inscribed with a text in Ancient Egyptian, with hieroglyphs, but also its translation in Ancient Greek, being the starting point for deciphering hieroglyphics.
3. Musée d’Orsay, Paris, France
The second most visited art museum in France and sixth worldwide, the Musée d’Orsay holds mainly French art dating from 1848 to 1914, including paintings, sculptures, furniture, and photography. It is located in the former Gare d’Orsay, an remarkable Beaux-Arts railway station on the left bank of the Seine River in Paris.
4. Natural History Museum, London, United Kingdom
Famous for the incredible Blue Whale skeleton greeting guests in the main hall, London’s Natural History Museum exhibits a vast range of specimens from various segments of natural history. It is home to life and earth science specimens comprising some 80 million items within five main collections: botany, entomology, mineralogy, palaeontology and zoology. To make thinks more interesting for the truly passionate visitors, every once in a while, the museum organises sleepovers, both for adults and children, the latter not serving any alcohol of course.
5. teamLab Planets, Tokyo, Japan
Tokyo’s teamLab only opened in 2018, but has quickly made its way among the most popular museums around the world. Using digital technology and interactive displays to transform the museum visiting experience. Visitors are asked to remove their shoes at the entrance and walk through water before moving on to the 4 large-scale artwork spaces and 2 gardens. The artworks change under the presence of people, blurring the perception of boundaries between the self and the works.
6. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Founded in The Hague on 19 November 1798 and moved to Amsterdam in 1808, the Rijksmuseum is the national museum of the Netherlands, dedicated to Dutch arts and history. The museum has on display 8,000 objects of art and history, from their total collection of 1 million objects from the years 1200–2000, among which are some masterpieces by Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Johannes Vermeer.
7. Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, Spain
The Prado Museum, officially known as Museo Nacional del Prado, is the main Spanish national art museum, located in central Madrid. It is widely considered to house the single best collection of Spanish art and one of the world’s finest collections of European art, dating from the 12th century to the early 20th century, based on the former Spanish royal collection.
8. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Located on the same square as the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh Museum houses the largest collection of Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings in the world. It also has a comprehensive collection of notable works of the Starry Night’s author contemporaries in the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements, as well as sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou.
9. American Museum of Natural History, New York, New York
The American Museum of Natural History is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. Located in Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 20 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library. The museum collections contain about 35 million specimens of plants, animals, fungi, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, human remains, and human cultural artifacts, as well as specialized collections for frozen tissue and genomic and astrophysical data, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time.
10. Anne Frank House, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Yet another Amsterdam museum, the Anne Frank House is the house where a young Jewish girl, Anne Frank, and four other people hid from the Nazis during the German occupation of the Netherlands during World War II. While she did not survive the war, the diary she kept at the time was published in 1947, the English translation, called “The Diary of a Young Girl”, often referred to as “The Diary of Anne Frank”, considered one of the best books of the 20th century.
