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It merely reflects the search interest in particular topics. Google Trends is not a scientific poll and shouldn’t be confused with polling data. Is Google Trends the same as polling data? Special characters: Trends filters out queries with apostrophes and other special characters.
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Searches made by very few people: Trends only shows data for popular terms, so search terms with low volume appear as "0"ĭuplicate searches: Trends eliminates repeated searches from the same person over a short period of time. Google Trends does filter out some types of searches, such as: Given this, those relying on Google Trends data should understand that it’s not a perfect mirror of search activity. This would then make it harder to keep such activity filtered out from other Google Search products where high-fidelity search data is critical. While we have mechanisms in place to detect and filter irregular activity, these searches may be retained in Google Trends as a security measure: filtering them from Google Trends would help those issuing such queries to understand we’ve identified them. Google Trends data reflects searches people make on Google every day, but it can also reflect irregular search activity, such as automated searches or queries that may be associated with attempts to spam our search results. What searches are included in Google Trends? The resulting numbers are then scaled on a range of 0 to 100 based on a topic’s proportion to all searches on all topics.ĭifferent regions that show the same search interest for a term don't always have the same total search volumes. Otherwise, places with the most search volume would always be ranked highest. Search results are normalized to the time and location of a query by the following process:Įach data point is divided by the total searches of the geography and time range it represents to compare relative popularity. Google Trends normalizes search data to make comparisons between terms easier. By sampling data, we can look at a dataset representative of all Google searches, while finding insights that can be processed within minutes of an event happening in the real world. Providing access to the entire data set would be too large to process quickly. While only a sample of Google searches are used in Google Trends, this is sufficient because we handle billions of searches per day. How is a sample of searches representative? Non-realtime data is a separate sample from real-time data and goes as far back as 2004 and up to 72 hours before your search. Real-time data is a sample covering the last seven days. There are two samples of Google Trends data that can be accessed: This allows us to display interest in a particular topic from around the globe or down to city-level geography. It’s anonymized (no one is personally identified), categorized (determining the topic for a search query) and aggregated (grouped together). Google Trends provides access to a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests made to Google.
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