Today Google Trends turns 15 years old. Since its inception, this free tool from Google has supported people in discovering data and information about the topics most searched for by people through Google search. Google Trends has become an important resource for journalists, researchers, academics, brands and people around the world showing what really matters. For its 15th birthday, Google wants to share 15 tips on how to use this tool effectively and usefully for journalists, academics and businesses. Here the guide is available for web surfers.
1. Filter your data by date: Google Trends can tell you what people were searching for on a specific date from 2004 to just a few minutes ago. It is also based on two sets of data: historical data (from 2004 up to three days ago) and real time (dating back to the previous week). Real time data is more accurate, arriving minute by minute data.
2. Trend Information vs. Most Searched Information: Popular (or growing) searches are the ones that run the fastest and are useful for monitoring changes. Trend data is dynamic, so it can fluctuate.
3. When you can choose a topic: When you start using Google Trends, you can choose whether to search by “term” or “topic”. We recommend choosing the theme option if possible.
4. Compare Bigger Places and Smaller Places: How would you compare searching for the same topic between a city like New York and a much smaller city? Google Trends normalizes search data to make it easier to compare terms.
5. Today’s trends: For many countries around the world, you can find out the trend of searching every day. From here you can also get an idea of the volume of searches on Google Trends tools.
6. Discover Moment Trends: Real-time research trends allow you to see what is happening at that very moment and see it in the context of news coverage.
7. Always make a comparison: If you really want to understand a trend metric, you can use relative comparisons to gauge its popularity. Take for example the weather, a topic that people search for every day.
8. Find out how to search different places for the same thing: This is one of the hidden features of Trends. You can compare up to five different topics or search terms, selecting the geographical region for each. For example, you can see how Covid-19 research has changed from country to country around the world over the past 12 months.
9. Trends can tell you more about our interests: Google Trends is a human-centered dataset. We look for what interests us and gives us an idea of what really matters to us. Although we may not fully understand these interests at certain times, it is likely that you will not be alone in wanting to learn more about a particular topic.
10. Trends are not surveys: It is important to remember that Google Trends is not a tool for creating scientific surveys and data should not be shared for this purpose. It aims to reflect research interests on specific topics over a specific period of time.
11. …but they can tell you a lot more: The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (Oecd) uses trends to track GDP each week between quarterly publications in order to get a more accurate view of what’s happening in the economy around it. the world.
12. Autocomplete and trend data don’t work the same way: AutoComplete tries to predict what you’re typing so you can find what you’re looking for faster. It’s still a predictive feature, but that doesn’t mean we want to predict things for people.
13. Find out what trend is nearby: Another interesting feature of the Trends app is the ability to see the top searches of the month or last year in an urban area without having to enter a search term.
14. Download your data: It’s simple, just click on the download button next to the graph. For a larger dataset, take a look at the daily popular search datasets from Google BigQuery.
15. AND REMEMBER: ENJOY GOOGLE TRENDS: About 15% of Google search queries per day have never been done before. It’s a great way to see how people’s interests around the world are constantly changing.
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