More People Than Ever Are Googling ‘Lucky Numbers’ Amid Powerball Fever

Google has received an unprecedented number of searches for the term “lucky numbers” in the days before Wednesday night’s Powerball drawing, the jackpot of which — $1.5 billion — is the largest lottery prize in history.

In the hour before the announcement Wednesday night, Google Trends tweeted a link to a metric plotting the term’s search frequency from 2004 until present.

A massive spike began in early January; prior to that, the frequency was unremarkable, barring a brief climb in March 2012, when Mega Millions jackpot was $656 million — the largest jackpot in history at that point.