Tracking Google Search Trends Using “Explore” (web)

Google has several features available to analyze Google data on the web, for free, without additional software. Google Trends “Explore” is one such feature.

**NOTE: You will need to click through the pages to view the entire tutorial. When you reach the end of a page, you will see the “page” navigator with numbers aligning with the pages of this tutorial.

Exploring interest in the keyword “covid” over time

Through the Google Trends site, you can explore trends by keyword, but also by topic. In the following example, I began with a simple exploration of the trends for the query (keyword) “covid” between January 1, 2020, and March 9, 2023, capturing a majority of the pandemic leading up to mid-March 2023.

I can look at the interest over time for the keyword query “covid” (shown in this first widget below). I can move my cursor over the widget to explore the dates more closely. Interest for “covid” appears to peak between January 2-8, 2022, but this was also immediately following the implementation of improved trend measurement tools by Google, so I would take it carefully.

The last set of items on the page includes related topics and related queries. If I select “top” in the topics widget, I see that “Coronavirus Disease 2019” is the number 1 topic related to the keyword “covid.” I can use this information to inform additional explorations.

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