Ad firm uncovers Maine’s top search term for the year. Turns out, we’re into real estate.

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff, left, and chief economist Stan Humphries, in their downtown Seattle office. (Ellen M. Banner/Seattle Times/TNS)

Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff, left, and chief economist Stan Humphries, in their downtown Seattle office. (Ellen M. Banner/Seattle Times/TNS)

You can tell a lot about people based on what they’re searching for online — that’s maybe why you get so many maps and studies on top regional search terms.

The latest group to release a ranking of top search terms by state is the online advertising firm WordStream, which used Google Trends’ “rising trends” data to see which search terms have been spiking in use across each of the 50 states over the past year.

WordStream data cruncher Elisa Gabbert eliminates a bunch of hot button phrases from the last year that would otherwise dominate the Google search landscape nationwide, like “Robin Williams” and “Ebola.”

She then isolated each state’s “trending query that wasn’t part of a nationwide trend” to see what we were all Googling moreso than people in other states.

In Maine? We spent the past year Googling “Zillow” a lot, apparently. Maine was one of three states with a disproportionately high search infatuation with the real estate database site, along with Utah and Indiana.

zillowMaine’s real estate market did continue to rebound in 2014, so maybe that’s why so many people here flocked to Zillow — or, more specifically, Googled “Zillow,” because we couldn’t remember the URL www.zillow.com.

The term “Patriots” was the top search term in Washington, D.C., either because the people there finally came around to joining us New Englanders in our love of the football team, or because of an increased interest in tea party political organizations.

In a bit of a pleasant surprise, the residents of only one state — Arizona — spent an outsized amount of time searching for “Jennifer Lawrence” during the year when her personal cache of nude photos was reportedly hacked and distributed online.

The folks of Ohio Googled “LeBron James” a lot, undoubtedly due to his return to his hometown Cleveland Cavaliers basketball team. Maryland web surfers went looking for “cool math games” more than people in any other state, and our neighbors in New Hampshire were always losing their date books — Googling “calendar 2014” the most of anyone.

Two of New England’s six states — Massachusetts and Rhode Island — searched disproportionately for “Santander,” which I admittedly had to Google myself, because I’d never heard of it before. Apparently it’s a bank.

search terms