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With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.About Hot Trends

With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of today’s top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the U.S. You can also select a recent date in history to see what the top rising searches were and what the search activity looked like over the course of that day. We update Hot Trends hourly.

1. How does Google Trends work?Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph — plotted on a linear scale.

Located just beneath our search-volume graph is our news-reference-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. 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 that spike. Currently, only English-language headlines are displayed, but we hope to support non-English headlines in the future.

Below the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends displays the top cities, regions, and languages in which people searched for the first term you entered.

2. How does Hot Trends work?

Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather,” Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.

For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities. We also display news, blog, and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today. Hot Trends is updated hourly. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.

3. How many terms can I compare? And what other functionality is available?

You can compare up to five terms by separating each with a comma. To compare trend info for “mittens” and “bathing suits,” for example, simply enter mittens, bathing suits and click “Search Trends.”

To see how many searches contained either of two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: “|”. For example, to determine how many searches contained the terms “mittens” or “gloves,” just enter mittens | gloves.

To compare multi-word terms, use parentheses. To see how many searches were done for either “winter mittens” or “gloves,” for instance, just enter (winter mittens) | gloves (if you don’t use parentheses, your query will be interpreted to mean all searches for “winter mittens” or “winter gloves”).

You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign. To see how many searches contained the term “maps” butnot “google,” for instance, just enter maps-google.

To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, you can put your terms in quotation marks. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)

Note: when you use any of these advanced features — quotation marks, minus signs, or vertical bars — Google Trends will only display the search-volume graph. The news portion of the product doesn’t support advanced functionality at this time.

4. How can I change the time frame, region, or sub-region (state or province) of the results? You can use the drop-down boxes under the search volume graph of the Google Trends results page to restrict your results to a particular time frame or region. The restrictions will affect both the search-volume and news-reference-volume graphs, and the city, region, and language data that appear below the graphs, though news-reference volume may not be available on a per region basis.

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. You can now also select a time frame of the last 30 days or 12 months. To view the results for a particular sub-region, just use the drop-down boxes or click on the link for a particular country or sub-region on the Google Trends results page.

5. How do the Cities, Regions, Sub-regions and Languages work?

Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.

6. How does counting and ranking of the Top Cities, Regions and Languages work, and what does ‘normalized’ mean? For counting and ranking cities, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities’ ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.

Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized. This means we’ve divided the sets of data by a common variable to cancel out the variable’s effect on the data and allow the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. If we didn’t normalize the results, and instead displayed the absolute rankings of cities, they wouldn’t be all that interesting. For example, New York city would be the top city for many results because there are lots of searches from there.

Keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users’ propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn’t on the Top Regions list for the term “haircut” doesn’t necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society’s conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for “haircut” make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions.

7. This tool makes search information public. What about my personal search data?You can rest assured your personal search data remains safe and private. Our graphs are based on aggregated data from millions of searches done on Google over time. And the results Google Trends displays are produced entirely by an automated formula. As an additional measure, Google Trends only returns results for terms that receive a significant amount of search traffic.

We understand and respect your concerns about your privacy, and we encourage you to learn more by reading our privacy policy.

8. How accurate and up-to-date is the information provided by Google Trends ? Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means it’s still in its early stages of development. The data Google Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that Trends makes use of. We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably don’t want to write your Ph.D. dissertation based on this information. We’re now updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly.

9. When is it okay to use the information I find on Google Trends ? You’re free to use any of the information you find on Google Trends, but, before you do, please check out our Terms of Use. If you choose to use the information, please make sure to appropriately attribute it to Google.

10. When will this tool be available for my country or language? Currently, Google Trends is only available in English and Chinese. Hot Trends is only available in English. We hope to roll out Google Trends in other regions and languages in the future.