Google has today announced, what its calling, “the biggest expansion of Google Trends since 2012“. The search giant has launched a fully re-worked trends, with more focus towards generating and presenting real-time data.
The new design change, apart from addition of new features, is pretty much in line with Google’s ongoing Material Design philosophy. Google has gradually shifted all of its products to Material design, ever since it was introduced in last year’s I/O.
With the new Google Trends, you can now find real-time data on everything from the FIFA scandal to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign kick-off, and get a sense of what stories people are searching for. Trends will now show real-time activity of what people searched for during the build-up and actual happening of an event.
Google says, that many of these changes are based on feedback it collected through conversations with hundreds of journalists and others around the world, and would thus give you a faster, deeper and more comprehensive view into Google’s searches, thats practically a view of the entire world.
And to assist those journalists and data analysts, Google is also providing Datasets. Google says that it has a dedicated News Lab team which examines trending topics every day to build-up into those data sets. Analysts and Journalists can follow Google’s Lab on Twitter to stay up to date. And for data journalists who want to do their own analysis, starting today Google will publish data sets on specific topics to its Github page.
While Google Trends will be providing real-time updates behind the more than 100 billion searches that take place on Google every month, it will provide event-by-event updates in the case of major happenings like the Oscars or the NBA finals. During such events, you’ll be able to track the stories most people are searching for and where in the world interest is peaking. You will further be able to explore this data by selecting any time range in the last week from the date picker.
Apart from this, Google is also launching a new, “story-centric homepage”. On the new google.com/trends, you’ll find a ranked, real-time list of trending stories that are gaining traction across all of Google. And in addition to Search, that will include data from YouTube, Google+ and other Google properties, stitched together to give you a more comprehensive view on the topic you’re looking for.
The redesigned Google Trends homepage is now available in 28 countries around the world, and Google will continue to add more locations in the coming months.
