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Google Trends
Contents:
Why use Google Trends?
Using Google Trends
Examples of using Google Trends
Using Trends to understand what is going on in peoples lives
Using Trends to identify popular search terms
Using Trends to compare regions
Activity

Why use Google Trends?

Have you ever had an experience where, as you search for a certain topic over time, the
amount of interest the general public has in that same topic changes?
For example, maybe you discovered a particular movie star before she became famous.
Or, in your region, there may be particular months in which people prefer to get married, so
there are more searches for photographers or other wedding services around that time.
Google Trends is a way to monitor the shift in people's interests. It lets you explore terms
people are using in their queries, and how many times, where, and when people are
searching for specific terms. Google Trends gives you a great way to get insight into what
people are thinking by letting you seein aggregatewhat people are actually searching
for with Google.
With Google Trends you can:
see when people are submitting a lot of queries on a topic,
discover the shifts in the way people ask questions about a topic over time, and
compare two different kinds of queries on a topic to see which one is more
common.
You can compare:
use of different keywords,
queries on a topic from different locations around the world, and
changes in searches for a topic over time.
Doing so both gives you a sense of how people are thinking about a topic and the ways
you might choose to search for it. If you have Term A and Term B, and you discover that
Term A is ten times more common than Term B, then you might not want to use that
second term.

Using Google Trends

1. Search for [google trends] and click on the link.
2. Run a test search, comparing two different kinds of music, hiphop and rap. Type
[hiphop,rap] into the search box.
Notice,the comma used to separate the two terms. Unlike most Google tools, where a
comma doesn't mean anything, here it separates your key search terms.

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Figure 1: When searching for [hiphop,rap] in Google Trends, the words are not as close to
each other in usage as one would expect.
The first thing I notice here is that hiphop, which I would have thought would be a lot more
popular, is showing kind of low usage. Both words are relatively constant over time, with
the term hiphop going down slightly over the past several years.
Why is it so low?
Perhaps it is spelling hiphop as one word? I wonder if using the two-word spelling, hip hop,
would be better?

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Figure 2: The query [hip hop, rap] has results much more as I had expected. Note how the
two terms start out in about 2004 at a similar level of frequency in the query stream.
This data is for worldwide use, because worldwide is the default regional setting. What
happens if we change the regional setting to the United States?

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Figure 3: On the bottom, left-hand side of the page locate the section titled Limit to and
click on Worldw ide to see regional options. Click on countries with arrows next to them to
see regional divisions that you can individually select.

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Figure 4: The results for just the United States are a bit different. The terms hip hop and
rap are much more competitive in the US than worldwide.

Examples of using Google Trends

Using Trends to understand what is going on in peoples lives
Here is a simple example: I did a Google Trends analysis for the two terms, [beach] and
[snow], and I am looking at searches from 2004 to the end of 2012.

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Figure 5: Results for the query [beach,snow] in Google Trends.

Notice that the periods during which people are searching for [beach] are almost the exact
opposite of when people are searching for [snow]. The blue line (beach) dips when the red
line (snow) goes up, and vice versa.
I limited the search to just the United States. If we were using the entire world, beach would
become more frequent during the winter months in the northern hemisphere, because it is
then summer in the southern hemisphere. Limiting by region can be a really useful way to
drill down into this kind of information.
You can also get information on the regions of the country from which most of those
queries are coming. The blue queries, for [beach], are coming frequently from Florida and
from places in the southern United State. By clicking on the word snow, just above the map
of the United States, you could see from where in the country most of the queries for
[snow] originate.
This is an incredibly useful way to look at query data over time.
You could also do this to contrast different terms and different places across multiple
terms.

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Figure 6: Here I have looked at the two words [flu] versus [influenza], and I have limited the
search to be for just India.
Notice that for the term flu there's a high spike in the April-May time frame in India. But a
separate search for the United States shows that the queries for flu peak in late in the year,
in October or November.

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Figure 7: Comparing the search patterns for [flu] in India to the patterns in the United
States shows that flu seasons differ around the world.

Using Trends to identify popular search terms

The second thing you look at when comparing two different terms, in this case, flu and
influenza, is to understand which is one is going to be more popular with searchers.
Consider the term [hurricane]:

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Figure 8: A worldwide Trends search for [hurricane] shows especially heavy use of the
term in the Caribbean, United States, and Canada.
Hurricanes are big storms that happen typically coming up out of the Caribbean and into
Florida. So, when you look at the map, there's no surprise that it is a really common query
coming from those regions.
On the far right-hand side, notice there is a list of particular terms that are associated with
your key term. You can also find information on the relative ratios of how often [hurricane]
was searched for along with these other terms.

Using Trends to compare regions

Lets say I want to compare how often people search for information about the popular raw
fish dish, sushi, in several regions around Japan.

Step 1. Since I know that Japan has several different writing systems, I want to start by
seeing whether people searching in Japanese use characters (
more often when they refer to sushi.

) or phonetic spelling (

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Figure 9: The search for [

commonly searched.

] shows that the word written in characters (

) is more

Step 2. To compare the use of the word

(sushi) in different parts of Japan, I first go

just below the search terms in the middle of the left-hand side of the screen:

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Figure 10: Click on Other comparisons

Figure 11: Click on Locations

Be sure to click the X in front of the term you dont want, so that you only have one search
term when you transition to sharing locations.

Step 3. Click on the location box, and then on the arrow next to Japan. You will get a list of
regions within the country from which to select.

Figure 12: Choosing administrative divisions within Japan.

You can select up to five locations to compare.
I compared the number of searches for [ ] (sushi) in Tokyo, Kanagawa, Nagano, and
Ishikawa, Japan, and also compared the number of searches for [ ] (sushi) in Brazil, the

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country outside Japan with the most people of Japanese descent.

There are many ways in which to use Google Trends to focus on specific information
about popular search terms, understand how often specific words are searched in various
countries and regions, in different periods of time, and in comparison to other terms.
Through this process you can start to see into the mind of what people are actually
querying, and the language with which they're doing queries.
Play around with it and see what you find.

Activity
Rugby season is well underway. But who is searching for it around the world?
Compare searches for rugby over the past twelve months from Numibia, Sri Lanka, Paupa
New Guinea, France, and Argentina.
What topics do you find interesting? Compare the number of searches for your topic
among various locations, time periods, or using different search terms to describe one
idea.
Post something interesting you learn in the forum.
To learn more about Google Trends, visit the Google Trends Help Center.

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