12.2 Google Trends: Overview
Google Trends
As one of the world’s major search engines, Google reveals a lot about what people are interested in or what they are afraid of. In 2021 as economic uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic deepened, the world searched for “how to start a business” more than “how to get a job”. That February, while stock markets remained subdued by the pandemic, bitcoin prices soared above the $58k level. Guess where public intrigue was? It certainly wasn’t in ‘buying the dip’.
Since the search data displayed by Google Trends is as recent as an hour and dates back as far as 2004, the platform provides context by allowing journalists, researchers, and marketers to observe how patterns in search queries change over time or simply to get a snapshot of what the public are curious about at that moment.
Why punctuation matters in Google Trends
Searches can be refined by using these operators: + , – , and “ “. Here’s how they affect your results:
“Blueberry jam” – adding double quotation marks will give you results that include the term ‘blueberry jam’. In other words, your results could include words before and after the term ‘blueberry jam’ e.g. ‘blueberry jam recipes’ or ‘thick blueberry jam’.
Blueberry + jam – the results will include either ‘blueberry’ or ‘jam’
Blueberry – jam – Using the minus symbol means results containing the word ‘jam’ will be excluded
Blueberry + bluebery – results will include common spelling mistakes for the word ‘blueberry’
How should we interpret the charts in Google Trends?
To illustrate how Google Trends works, let us compare worldwide searches for two of the latest fads in financial speculation – bitcoin and non-fungible tokens (NFT) over a five year period. For the sake of simplicity, we will confine our analysis to English language searches only.
The chart shows that public interest in bitcoin has subsided relative to other searches after its heady days in 2021. Interest in NFTs on the other hand never came close to bitcoin’s, and remains subdued since peaking from January 23-29 2022.
When you mouse over the trend lines, you will see a date and a number next to the search term. That number is by no means the absolute search volume. Rather, it represents normalized data. It is also important to bear in mind that a line trending upwards means the term’s popularity is increasing compared to other searches. It does not mean the total number of searches is rising.
Google Trends also allows us to compare results between regions. While NFT appears to be more popular in Asian markets (Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong), a clearer picture of NFT’s popularity will only emerge when search terms in the local languages are included. In markets such as South Korea where Google is not the main search engine, results from other sources should be considered as well.
The ‘rising’ list shows top and rising search terms associated with any topic or trending story. Next to each term is a percentage representing the term’s growth relative to the previous time period. In this case,we see a list of bitcoin competitors and popular NFTs. However, the word ‘Breakout’ is displayed next to each term instead of a percentage, meaning searches for queries like ‘cardano’ and ‘nft opensea’ grew by over 5000% compared to the previous five years.