Here are Some Interesting Facts and Tips About Google Trends

What is Google Trends? Google Trends is essentially a website owned by Google that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search across various regions and languages. In order to do so, graphs are used to compare the search volume of different queries over time.

Trends, as you may have realized, can be an extremely useful tool for pretty much every news outlet – be it a TV news network or a blog on the web – that needs to provide coverage on current and relevant topics. But anyone, even those who don’t work in the media news sector, can simply visit Trends’ site out of curiosity to discover what people are searching for right now.

Now, let’s go more in depth about Google Trends to find out how to get the most out of this platform!

How Google Trends works

Google Trends can tell you what people were searching for on Google Search at any date from 2004 to a few minutes ago. Note that there’s a difference between “trending” and “top-searched” topics: trending searches accelerate the fastest, while top-searched (or “most-searched”) are the most-searched queries in a specific time frame. If you’re curious about trying Trends, know that you’ll get the option to either search for a “term” or “topic”. Choosing “topic” is recommended, since topics are language-neutral and account for spelling variations and mistakes, as well as multiple names for the same thing.

What’s “hot” right now?

Want to check out what’s trending today around the world? You can go here! And if you want real-time search trends that tell you what’s happening in the moment and in the context of news coverage, go here instead!

How can you understand the scale of a trend? Well, you’ll need to use relative comparisons to gauge popularity of a given topic. Since weather is one of the largest and most consistently searched for topics everyday, you can use it as a point of reference. Trends also allows you to discover how different places search for the same thing: you can compare up to five topics or search terms, and for each one you can specify the geography. For instance, searches for COVID-19 varied in different countries around the world over the past 12 months.

Discover common interests with Trends

Google uses Trends to visualize people’s common interests, but it shouldn’t be considered as a poll, meaning a tool for creating scientific polls which uses polling data. In fact, it merely reflects the search interest in particular topics during a specified duration of time. With that said, Trends can still tell a lot regarding what’s happening to the world’s economy, as demonstrated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which uses Trends to track GDP each week.

A comparison between Autocomplete and Trends

Google Search’s Autocomplete feature and Trends work in a similar fashion, but they’re not the same: Autocomplete tries to predict what you’re typing so you can get to what you’re looking for faster. But because it’s a predictive feature, Google doesn’t want to surprise people with predictions. Therefore, even though you can search for whatever you want, there are policies for what can appear in Autocomplete. Trends, on the contrary, lets you look up search interest in any query. Because you’re typing it in and asking to see the results, the site will show you available Trends data for almost any query.

Download your Google Trends data

Lastly, you can download your Google Trends data by clicking on the download button next to each chart if you’re interested.

Source: Google Blog