Intro to Google Trends data

welcome to the Google Trends tutorial series I'm Daniel Weisberg search Advocate at Google and in this video I'll take you on a journey into the world of search data to help you understand exactly what you see when you visit Google Trends and search for a term when you understand what the data means you will be able to find more and better ways to use it in your day-to-day work I'll explain some fundamental concepts like sampling and normalization to shed light on the way we process our data then I'll run through the product to give a

bird's eye view of where and how the data is shown in Google Trends and I may need to stop for capuccino on the way and what is Google Trends about Google Trends is a tool that provides a random sample of aggregated anonymized and categorized Google searches and what does this all mean to answer this question and before diving into the tool let me step back to explain how our data is created I'll be a bit theoretical at first so please hold tight for 2 minutes and then I promise I'll get more practical First there are

billions of Google and YouTube searches a day if we look at every single one of them it can take a long time for us to show you the data for that reason we look at a statistically significant random sample of the data or simply put we look at a portion of Google searches that is representative of the total this allows us to process and make data available within minutes and still guarantee that the data represents the overall Trends second we clean and aggregate the data to make sure we remove the noise while ensuring the privacy

of Google users this means we exclude terms that are searched by very few people like my full name or repeated searches from the same person over a short period of time like me searching for how to boil eggs before breakfast third we normalize the data in order to make it easier to compare for every search term or combination of terms we look at the time frame location and other parameters and estimate the number of occurrences for the trim then we divide that by the total number of searches for the same parameters without the term we

repeat this for every point in the chart and lastly we normalize the data such that the highest point is made equal to 100 and all other points are adjusted relative to it and that was a theory part thanks for sticking with me I told you it would be just two minutes now you're probably eager to start playing with the tool I'll talk a lot about it in the following episodes but here's a sneak PE PE head to trends. google.com and enter a search term for example coffee on the explore page you'll see how this term

has trended in the past day you can customize the date range in the drop- down menu and adjust the dates to your data needs you can go back as early as 2004 you can also choose which property or product you'd like to analyze web search which stands for the main Google search Google Images news shopping or YouTube search if you want to know what terms are on the rise you can head to the trending now page we'll go through all the two capabilities in the upcoming episodes now back to the explore page you'll notice that

sometimes in addition to a search term you get an option to choose a topic for example when you type capuccino you can choose either the search sh exactly matching capuccino or the capuccino coffee drink topic which is the group of Search terms that relate to that entity this will include the exact term as well as misspellings so if you're like me and can't remember if capuccino has two PS or two C's or both the topic would cover all options the topic also includes acronyms and it covers all languages which can be very useful especially with

when looking at global data using topics you also avoid including terms that are unrelated to your interests for example if you're looking at the trends for the company alphabet you might want to choose the alphabet in company topic if you just type alphabet the trends will also include a lot of other meanings as you can see in this example that was an overall view of the Google Trends tool remember the data provided by by Trends is not absolute search volume which means you cannot know exactly how many people search for a specific term the data

is simplified into a metric called search interest within a range of 0o to 100 this makes it easier for comparison while respecting the privacy of Google users this means that you cannot use the data to see how many people are searching for a particular term but you can use it to see how the popularity of that term has changed over time you can also compare the search interest of different terms across countries Google properties and categories I hope this video helped you understand our data better and that now you can explain it to other people

in meetings and social Gatherings trust me it's a great topic for a party for the next episodes I'll share this beautiful set with two Google Trends Engineers who will help explain all the cool stuff you can do with this powerful tool to make sure you don't don't miss any of our videos subscribe to the Google search Central YouTube channel and stay tuned [Music]