The World of Google Trends
Roughly for the past 20 years, Google has been keeping a public record of all of its users’ searching habits, and although this may be of some sort of privacy concern, it makes for an interesting blog topic so that’s what I’ll be reviewing today. Google Trends is a feature of search history that indicates how much, over a given period of time, a given search word is inserted into Google’s search engine compared to the overall search volume of the web. With it, you’re able to compare multiple searches within different time periods and regions and sometimes it leads to some pretty interesting findings.
I recently stumbled across Google Trends after seeing it mentioned in an article about coronavirus. The article was talking about some pretty alarming stuff. In the past few months, the relative interest in Coronavirus buzzwords in the U.S have gone down to almost nothing when compared to what it was at the beginning of the pandemic. For example, in this graph, you can see that the term “social distancing” went from having a value of 100 interest during around mid may to having around only a value of 1 interest in late October, around Halloween. The values are ranked relatively so if a specific search has a value of 5 interest on some random date, that means that on that day, that search was mentioned 5% as many times as the day that it was mentioned the most.
I think this trend specifically is somewhat important and concerning as it could imply that many Americans’ mindsets on Coronavirus and its dangers are becoming more lenient, despite the virus not physically changing at all. When compared to the chart of COVID-19 cases in the U.S, you can see that it’s basically the Google Trend chart but reversed.
Pretty scary stuff.
Anyway, on a lighter note, Google Trends is also a pretty cool tool just to look at even for less alarming subjects so here are some more Google Trends that I found interesting.
Starting off with a pretty mild and predictable one, the term “Thanksgiving” always peaks around the time of Thanksgiving. Cool.
Here’s an interesting one, the term “Kale” seems to jump during January. My guess is that this is related to the many new year’s resolutions on getting that are set this time of year.
Corn virus.
The Beatles are slowing fading away :(. From 75 in 2004 to about 15 today, their search value has greatly diminished.
This may look like an electoral map, but this is actually the comparison between Americans that googled Fox News and CNN in the last 12 months. Hmmmm…
I think this is cool. This is the distribution of the most searched of each of these religions in every state.
During the months of July, the term “irony” dips in searches for some reason. I honestly have no explanation for this one, this one’s weird.
The term “flat earth” has significantly increased overtime. I feel like this graph should be reversed, but I guess with the internet you never know.
This will conclude my Google Trends tour. There is a lot more to explore through Google Trends, but I hope gave a good glimpse into what it looks like. I think that this kind of stuff is really interesting since it shows an unsaid and often unnoticed sense of togetherness of the world. With how divided it may seem over the media, I think these trends are a fun way to look at how similar we all are sometimes. I urge you to go look into these for yourselves because I think they are somewhat valuable and definitely interesting. There is much more weird stuff out there and I’d love to hear other trends that you guys find interesting.
Ethan,
I found this analysis both humorous and informative. I think that google search terms are becoming (as the internet becomes more and more ubiquitous) an increasingly useful indicator of our Nation’s demographics. The religion search terms are a great example of this. It is interesting how this will be used in the future. Will we see google search terms used by political parties to determine what areas they need to do last minute campaigning? Will companies look to google search terms to build marketing plans? Or will it just be a fun thing to look at? Great blog post.
Thanks for the Google Trends tour, Ethan! I went down the rabbit hole of looking into a lot of search terms this summer. Your findings were really interesting! I think it’s really cool how every single shift in the trends can be justified by a reason, even though we might not know what it is. Your guess of New Year’s resolutions for the kale trend sounds pretty likely in my book! I found it hilarious how the interest in “irony” over time had a distinct pattern that kept repeating throughout the years. Your blog post as a whole reminded me of something I saw on Twitter after the AP Calculus exam last year! If I remember correctly, I think a search term like “Riemann sums” peaked the day of the exam, which was pretty telltale.