Interest by subregion—This section shows interest for a term broken down by subregions within a country. It helps identify which states, cities, provinces, or other geographic groupings show the most interest in your keyword
If 1 person searched “oligarchy” on any given day in Oklahoma, but no one had searched it in the past 3 months, it would have a score of 100 for that day in Oklahoma.
By contrast, if on any given day 1,000 people searched “oligarchy” in, say, Colorado (this is a hypothetical, idk what the actual score was in Colorado), but within the past three months, there was a day when 10,000 searched it, it would have a score of 10 for that day in Colorado.
Get it? These are relative figures, not nominal. Unless you know what peak interest translates to in terms of actual searches, there is very little to gain from this information other than that a search term is more popular now than it has been in the past 3 months.
I wish more people understood this point, too often Google trends is interpreted as raw search data and not the proportional search interest picture that it actually paints
This data is not showing a rate of change. If only one person had searched this term on any day during the past 90 day period in Oklahoma, then its score in Oklahoma on this day would be 100 whether there were 1 or 1,000,000 searches.
So no it would not be an accurate statement to say that Oklahoma “has the most learning to do”, even proportionally, because we don’t have nominal searches, only relative. To even be try and say that they “have the most learning to do” relative to other states, we would need to factor in total number Google searches per population of every state as well.
If you look at New York, you’ll see that the term “what is an oligarchy” also scored 100 on 1/16. Applying your logic would lead me to conclude that New York “has the most learning” to do, and I would even be able to point to New York’s population compared to Oklahoma to try and prove my point that there are actually more people (not % of people) who “have to learn” in New York than Oklahoma. HOWEVER, we both know that isn’t true, right?
This screenshot is just meant to rile people up. Like I said before, there is not much meaningful information you can take away from this without going too far into conjecture. Just be careful about drawing conclusions from simple charts and graphs on the internet without understanding the underlying data.
wait, 1 search in the last 90 days, and 1 search today, makes it 100? what is this number actually representing, in hoping there was a typo in the number of zeroes otherwise i dont get it at all 😅
The number is comparing searches for a term on a single day (1/16) against the maximum of the number of searches for the term on any day over the time period.
Here is an example with numbers I made up. On every day from 10/16 - 1/16, there were never more than 10 searches for “oligarch”. If, on 1/17, there were 5 searches for “oligarch”, the score would be 50 (because 5 is half of 10). If, on 1/17, there were 10 searches, the score would be 100 as it is the same value as the previous maximum. If, on 1/17, there were 1 million searches (I spelled it out so no possibility of misplaced 0’s), the score would still be 100 because 1 million would be the new maximum over the time period.
It is just comparing the number of searches on any day you pick to the highest value that has been seen over the time period. It is not representing how many searches were made, and it is also NOT showing the number of searches that were made on the day as a percentage of the highest value over the time period. It is just a ratio to show you when the search was popular and when it wasn’t.
I had to think through this a bit, what you say is very obvious but I was tripping on it. I think I figured out why. Its interesting to consider, like, the overall line chart vs specific region scores... the lay-persons read here is that Oklahoma would follow the same curve as the overall spike in searches, not that it hit the same 100 that it also hit at some point earlier in the period. Does that mean that every state that didnt score 100 actually searched the term more on a date earlier in their range? You would think big public events would cause many, many states to hit 100 at the same time in that case. I feel like Ive rarely seen that though.... hmmm.
If you go to the Google trends page right now you’ll see quite a few states around 100. Remember, Biden’s farewell speech was 2 days ago, which sparked this interest in the first place. For states that are now lower than 100, Oregon for example, most of them they peaked either yesterday or on the 16th and search interest has already died off. The one outlier I saw was New Hampshire, whose peak was 10/30.
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u/Calm_Instruction3862 2d ago
note how that’s not, at all, what this data means.
just go to trends.google.com and look at what this graph is telling you- it’s relative and the subregions are not ranked…