Google has today pushed an update to its Trends product, which it says is the biggest expansion to the search analysis product since 2012. The goal with this update, the company says, is to provide a “faster, deeper and more comprehensive view of our world” through real-time data on everything from the FIFA scandal to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign kick-off.
The most immediate change you’ll notice, though, is in the addition of more Material Design styling. Here’s what Trends looked like before today, courtesy of Wayback Machine (some of the graphs couldn’t be crawled):
Another significant change is that Google will now help you understand the motivators behind the data – what’s causing a term to gain traction in Google searches – with the addition of trending YouTube videos and Google News stories right in the Trends search pages, and on the homepage in the form of featured stories. Here’s what that looks like on the Trends page for Stephen Elon (notable today because he’s leaving Microsoft):
Trends also now allows you to search a wider breath of topics, not just ones that are currently trending, for data on total searches and interest by geography big and small. You can get real-time data on the whole 100 billion searches that Google sees each month, and narrow down your time range to the past day or week to see the stories people are searching for most and where in the world interest is peaking.
Finally, the company says all of these changes are based on feedback they’ve collected through discussions with journalists from around the world, and for some of the most interesting topics, the company has collected and saved the datasets to Github for all to analyze. This revamp of Trends is live in 28 countries with more to come soon.
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