Final Project: Google Search Trends

For my last assignment of the semester in my Visual Analytics course I decided I would choose an interesting dataset. I stumbled upon a few good ones like coffee price changes, electric vehicle ownership in the United States, and number of Influenza cases from 2010–2019 but then I realized I didn’t have the money to pay for these datasets so I had to let them go.

Eventually I stumbled across a gold mine. I found a data set with top google trend searches from 2001–2019.

The difficult part about this data set is that it didn’t focus on numbers over time but more on ranking top 5 queries of different categories.

In the image above we can see 2 categories, Movie tailers and NBA teams and the queires are ordered on the right side from the top search (1) to the fifth highest searched (5).

In the line graph above I decided the best decision was to organize the data based on a specific location because googles data set was enormous. I chose to focus on trending data searches from the United States and this graph only focuses on the number of trending searches with no specific categories.

From 2008 to 2013 the number of trending searches increased steadily and quickly and after that they continuously decreased and hit a low at the years 2017 and 2019. This is interesting because I would expect there to be more trending searches as time progresses because more people are gaining access to internet and internet capable technology.

The data in this graph shows a significant difference from the graph above. The data is similar in that both charts show the number of trending searches on Google but this chart has a span from 2001 to 2020 and the previous one from 2006 to 2020. This graph shows trending searches around the globe and they increase throughout the whole time span with sudden drops here and there including in 2008, 2013, and 2016.

This dataset shows that as time progresses more and more searches are made which allow for even more trends to occur.

I decided not to use the ranking data of the set because I believe I would have gotten good visuals.

Link to my data — https://www.kaggle.com/dhruvildave/google-trends-dataset/code