Google has given its Google Trends website a facelift. As well as a fresh new look, the update introduces almost real-time trends, updated every hour on the homepage with links directly to related news articles. The site shows what is trending across Google Search, Google News and YouTube.
- Introduced in 2006, Google Trends shows the relative popularity of trending search queries on Google Search across geographical areas and in a variety of languages. The website uses graphs to display and compare the search volume of different queries over time.
- Google Trends has been put to good use by publishers and content marketers investigating trending topics to inspire content creation. The redesign is focused on making it easier to access the trend information gathered by the site, with real-time trends information now on the home page.
- The home page highlights leading search trends in the user’s local area. The four leading searches in the country or region are displayed in a carousel updated every hour. The addition of links to relevant news articles covering trending topics makes it easier to learn more about the subjects that people are searching for.
Using trend data
- Content creators seeking inspiration can look to trend pages curated by Google’s Trends Data editorial team. Search data on trending searches related to high-profile news or seasonal events is gathered into packages that provide journalists and marketers with trend data around topic clusters.
- In Spring, with searches for gardening advice spiking in the UK, the team has collected together a range of gardening queries to show what the UK’s gardeners are focusing on in 2023. Key searches suggest content on when to plant, when to prune and what kinds of bulbs to buy would perform well.
- There are also examples of how trends data has been used creatively by Google teams and in third-party newsrooms. Recent uses span a project examining how people search for the meaning of their dreams to how Axios used trending search data to highlight the biggest issues of the 2022 midterm elections in the US.
Digging deeper
Digging deeper into the site, users can explore trending searches by date as well as real time search trends. They can also change location to look at realtime and historical search trends in other countries. Searching on specific search terms shows interest over time and data on related topics and queries.
If you are new to Google Trends and unsure on how to make the best use of the data on the site, there are a series of five-minute tutorials running from a ‘Basics of Google Trends’ introduction to an ‘Understanding the Data’ lesson that will help publishers make the most of the trend data available.
