15 tips for getting the most out of Google Trends

9. Trends can help us visualize common interests: Google Trends is truly a human-centric dataset. We search for what we are interested in. Even if those interests may feel obscure at times, you’re likely not alone in wanting more information on a given topic. Google Trends helps us visualize and explore our dreams, dogs and cats and even how to fix a toilet. 

10. Trends are not polls: Google Trends is not a tool for creating scientific polls and shouldn’t be confused with polling data. It merely reflects the search interest in particular topics during a specified duration of time. 

11. …But they can tell you a lot: The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) uses Trends to track GDP each week, in between its quarterly releases, to get a more granular view of what’s happening to the world’s economy.

12. Autocomplete is not the same as Trends data: Autocomplete tries to predict what you’re typing so you can get to what you’re looking for faster. But because it’s a predictive feature, we don’t want to surprise people with predictions. So even though you can search for whatever you want, we have policies for what can appear in Autocomplete. Trends, on the other hand, is a tool where you can look up search interest in any query. Because you’re typing it in and asking to see the results, we’ll show you available Trends data for almost any query.

13. See what’s Trending near you: Another interesting feature on Trends in the U.S. is the ability to see what’s been trending in a metro area without even putting in a search term. You can see what was trending over the past month, or even year. For example, here’s what was trending in San Francisco over the past month.

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