It seems like everyone’s everyone is hooked on Wordle, and a recent study would indicate that more and more of you are cheating.
For those unfamiliar with Wordle, it’s a once-a-day game in which players get six chances to to guess a randomly selected five-letter word. However, Wordfinderx — a reference website for word games like Wordle and Scrabble — studied Google Trends data that suggest Google searches for the answer to Wordle’s daily puzzle have nearly tripled ever since The New York Times acquired the game in January.
The study found that searches for Feb. 15’s “AROMA” and Feb. 19’s “SWILL” daily Wordle solutions reached a 100 out of 100 on Google’s search popularity scale, which compares search results on a topic and then rates them on a scale of 0 to 100 “based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics,” according to Google.
In comparison, January 4’s “SIEGE” only reached a 1 on the same scale, while searches for the daily Wordle solution never topped 60 on Google’s scale prior to The New York Times‘ purchase of the game on January 31.
Simply put, based on the Google search trends, more and more people are turning to the internet for help solving their daily Wordle puzzle.
Players have complained that Wordle has become more difficult to solve since it was acquired by The New York Times, However, a simpler explanation for the uptick in players resorting to looking up the Wordle solution online could be that there are just more people than ever playing the game.