Google Trends is probably the most easily accessible (and fun) trends data source. A few days ago I was curious to see trends on something I’d been researching, got distracted and ended up spending an hour checking out random trends on the site.
Google reports ‘search interest’ – a scaled measure of how frequently a term was being searched – over any desired time period. It sets the maximum interest over the time period to 100, and scales the rest of the data accordingly. It’s a really cool quick and dirty method to check hypotheses and just see what the world’s thinking about!
Here’s a few trends I thought were pretty interesting –
*I’m bored – Sudden peak when #quarantine hit. Pretty obvious
*Where to donate – Minor peak when #corona hit, sharp peak early June in response to the various donation campaigns for the Black Lives Matter movement
*OpenTable – Peaks at Valentine’s day, completely drops off during quarantine, rising again now
*Virtual Date – Obvious peak at quarantine
*How to grow weed – Peak at 4/20, increase in interest when people were home doing nothing. Lol.
*Robinhood – Everyone’s trying to trade now!
What other interesting trends did you find?