Introduction

The past two weeks have been busy. Thanks to the spring semester coming to an end. Between wrapping up my term projects and assignments, there were also a few keys events that required my attention this week such as the release of the final avengers movie and the eagerly awaited battle between Men and the night walkers in this week's episode of Game of Thrones. In prepartion to watching them, I found myself googling (a lot!!) on topics or character as I geared upto watching them.

This made me wonder if it was just me, or if other people were doing the dame thing too? This made me curious to learn if there was a pattern to topics that trend based on their relation to seasonal and annual events, what topics and wh they trended on Google? Thankfully, Google's Trends is a wonderful proxy to see what lots and lots of people in the United States want to know using Google's web search.

So hop in, let's explore the trending topics on Google for the period from April 22 to May 6 in the US. Specifically, I am interested in how search interest in a topic increased or decreased over time.

Running the Numbers

To understand how current events impact people's search, I analysed search topics trending in the United States using Google Trends for two weeks from April 22 to May 06, 2019.
My assumptions for the analysis were—

But from my analysis of google trends data for the two weeks, some of my initial assumptions were proved right and some resulted in contradicting my hypothesis.
Some of the interesting findings are—

Search Analysis by Category

The top 10 most trending topics were labeled into categories such as Entertainment, Sports, Fashion, Arts, Business and News. Plotting them into a bubble chart based on the count of topics in each category shows that topics or terms related to Sports has been searched the most in the past weeks. This is mainly due to the current events such as the NFL Draft, NBA Games and other key annual sport events happening around the time. Sports is closely followed by Entertainment. Of all the terms grouped in Entertainmet, Game of thrones has the most number of the topics/terms being searched followed by the Avengers Endgame movie. Final season of Game of Thrones airing and the release of the most awaited final movie of the Avengers are primary reasons to why key words or characters related to them are the most trending.

Search Analysis by Subcategory

Grouping the search terms further into sub-categories, I was able to find relations between the trending search terms and current events related to them. For Example, with the NBA playoff games being held from April 10 this year, it is not surprising that the most search terms were related to Basketball. Similarly, NFL Draft for the year 2020 was held from April 25 to April 27 and NHL seasonal games being held resulted in Football and Hockey being the second and third most searched sport topics. The were a number of topics related to Entertainment trending including Films, TV Shows and Actors. The third popular category was News that included subcategories such as annual events like Ramadhan, Earth Day and key events such as Joe Biden announcing his presidential run and the birth of the royal baby. It is noteworthy that People subcategory from various top-level categories such as sports, Entertainment and Music were trending. This shows an interest in the lives of celebrities such as Actors, Athletes and Musicians.

Search Analysis by Popularity

Here, I plotted all the top 10 trending search topics for the weeks in question as a line chart according to their search count. Google Trends gives us an approximate number of searches for each topic. This helped me understand the extent of popularity of various search terms. For example, Thanos is the term with the highest search count (~15M). In addition to the release of the Avengers movie, the term's popularity could also be due to Google's Easter Egg Hunt celebrating the theatrical release of the movie. Similarly, there were four other terms, Earth Day, Teacher Appreciation Week, Ruth Asawa and Ediie Aikau that were highly popular and the reason for it was bacause of Google using a Doodle to signify these events and honor the people. This showed me that while most trending topics were related to current events, having a Google Doodle boosted the topic/term's search count tremendously.

Use the filters in the visualization to view only selected data. Sort according to search count. Hover over chart to enable tooltip displaying category, subcategory and search count for terms.

Search Analysis by Google's Search Score

Finally, it was time to plot the search terms according to their popularity. Search Scores are assigned by google based on a topic/terms search count in the search volvume.