Stop Using Google Trends — Medium
Alternatively titled ‘Be aware of context, and maybe start using Google AdWords’ Instead
Google Trends is a very interesting product, as it gives us real-time data on how people are using Google. Google is the Address Bar of the Internet, so if you need information on a topic, just type in “Euros” and you’ll have the scores and times of every game of the UEFA Euros Championship. Google can then track that interest in a topic and we can see it. But what shouldn’t you use Google Trends for? Well, until people start using it appropriately, everything.
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Google Trends is that it reports search numbers relatively within the date-range and in context of other trends.
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Trends doesn’t tell us, all it does is give us a nice graph with a huge peak.
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I’m disappointed that this is how data is being used, and really drives home the need for people to understand the data before they use it incorrectly. Google Trends is an interesting tool, but please do a bit more research before using it.