According to Google Trends, searches for ‘good news’ have reached all-time highs on Search. In fact, searches for good news have reached levels that are more than double that of any time since Google began publishing search data in 2004.
Email alerts from Google Trends can be a handy way to keep up with a specific topic on the web, but sometimes it can have unintended consequences. This week Google has suspended the Trends email alert service in New Zealand after it inadvertently breached a court order regarding a murder case.
As the name implies, Google Trends is a very useful service for finding what’s popular among users of the Search engine and generating historic term comparisons. Google is today introducing a new design that adds more data features for finding what’s trending, as well as a new focus on editorial content.
While Google Trends only provides a relative snapshot of people’s searches, it is nevertheless a quite interesting view into human behavior. At times, said behavior can be quite frustrating as evident by yesterday’s peak of “eyes hurt” searches on Google.
Google Trends tells the story of the result of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union. Trending searches include a 500% spike in ‘buy gold,’ a doubling in searches on getting an Irish passport and some people apparently wondering what just happened …
During elections and other major events, Google Trends usually posts interesting statistics and data visualizations based on search results. While not necessarily reflective of today’s New York primary, Bernie Sanders is leading (via The Hill) Hillary Clinton in search interest and other related terms.
Google has today pushed an update to its Trends product, which it says is the biggest expansion to the search analysis product since 2012. The goal with this update, the company says, is to provide a “faster, deeper and more comprehensive view of our world” through real-time data on everything from the FIFA scandal to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign kick-off.
Google Trends is a great place to go if you want to know what the web is up to on any given day; it does a great job of showing you trending search terms—and charts that put a ranking on basically everything—from almost any country in the world. Today, the functionality of this website has expanded, with Google announcing that they’ve added a new “Trending on YouTube” section which shows some of the most popular YouTube videos of the day.
Website owners who want to add visitor satisfaction surveys to their sites can now do so just by adding a single line of code, at a cost of just one cent per response thanks to a new tool from Google Consumer Surveys.
So far the service is limited to US visitors using non-mobile devices, so its immediate value will be limited, but it’s likely to be expanded in scope over time.
As an aside, recent reports that the British government is planning to use Google data as an alternative to its ten-yearly population census have been greatly exaggerated. All that is actually being proposed is to feed in Google Trends data as one small component of the information collated for the census.