Google Trends

by Trends Staff

Have you ever wondered what your neighbors are searching for online? Google Trends may offer insight into people’s googling habits. Google Trends tracks a term’s popularity over time and makes good use of volunteered, independent queries. More importantly, it has been helping journalists and the news industry explore potential stories and investigate a community’s interests.

Visitors can see trending searches from all over the world through the Explore tab. Entering “Wenatchee” into the search bar shows the popularity of that term over a period of time with a line graph. A map showing the geographic regions where those searches originated is available in the section below. Scrolling further down provides related topics and queries, meaning that users searching for the term “Wenatchee” also searched for the terms listed. At the time of writing, the terms “weather”, “air quality”, “bighorns”, and “bomb burritos”, were amongst the most common related queries in conjunction with the term “Wenatchee”.

Google Trends also has a Dive Deeper section were issues and events can be explored in detail. Project topics range widely. By selecting the Visualizing Google Data project, visitors can find a Local Year in Search. This project shows the most searched topics in 2022 by zip code. Unfortunately, the site uses a larger metropolitan area for this localized trend. Using Wenatchee zip code 98801 for example, pulls up trends in the Seattle, WA area. Once selected, visitors can see the top 10 trending searches as well as some trivial information like the top trending recipe in the area the year. A few other project topics accessible at this time include the 2023 Women’s World Cup and the 2023 NBA Finals.

For those with a more curious spirit, be sure to check out the Made with Trends section. It features projects created using Google data with names like “Google Frightgeist” and “The Shape of Dreams”. Users looking to exploring more serious topics are encouraged to view the Midterm elections 2022 visualization from Axios, were search data for decisive issues such as taxes and firearms, can be seen by congressional district.

Google Trends also offers short tutorials at the bottom of the home page. They can be useful to those interested in extracting data from the site or making the best use of this resource. Google Trends also has a newsletter for visitors that are interested in trending news.