Google Creates Trend Hunting Search Engine - Checking out the First Chart (Page 2 of 4 )
Okay, if you look in the upper left-hand corner, you see a chart. Here’s a better screen shot that isolates it from the rest of the page:
This is a search volume graph. Naturally enough, it compares the volume of searches done for these two terms over time, as indicated on the gray bar. As you can see, there are actually two separate graphs here. The upper graph focuses on actual searches. The lower graph is the news reference volume graph, which shows how many times those terms have appeared in Google news stories.
Just by looking at this graph, you can tell that searches for the term “skiing” seem to swing much more widely in volume than searches for the term “surfing,” despite the fact that they seem to receive about the same amount of coverage in the news. Looking at the timing, one can surmise that “skiing” is affected much more by the seasons than “surfing.”
Right about now you’re probably wondering about those boxes with letters in them that point to various parts of the graph. They match up with specific news headlines, which can be clicked:
While you can click on the links to follow them, please note that there aren’t any guarantees that the links actually work; even the most recent of the documents listed had expired. Ideally, these stories help you plot the popularity of certain terms, and possibly even how news stories affect that popularity. Here’s how Google explains it in the FAQ: “When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of the spike.” Only Google News stories with English language headlines are displayed, but Google plans to expand that to non-English headlines in the future.
You probably noticed a couple of drop-down menus labeled “All Regions” and “All years.” Those are the defaults, but they can be changed. The Regions list gives you a dizzying number of options, from Australia to Zimbabwe. Put in “Australia,” for example, and you’ll start seeing spikes for skiing in the middle of the year – it may be summer in the US, but it’s winter down under then. Depending on the region, Google might not have news references available, if that matters to you. (Changing the Region also changes the other chart, which I’ll get to later in this article).
The drop-down menu labeled “All years” lets you look at information for a single year – or even a single month. As with making changes to the Regions drop-down, changing the time frame drop-down affects everything. How does that affect what Google shows you? “When you restrict your results to a specific year or multi-year period, each point on the graph will represent a week’s worth of searches. When you restrict the results to a specific month, each point on the graph will represent one day of searches.”
Next: Checking out the Second Chart >>
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