Hasta La Gadget!

Dec 30

Google Trends Adds Numeric Scale for Better Comparisons

This article was written on June 11, 2008 by CyberNet.

Most of you have at least heard of Google Trends before, it’s Google’s comparison tool that allows you to enter in different topics to see how often it’s been searched for on Google. It’s not one of those features that the masses use, but it’s still nice that they have it. The last feature we recall them adding was “hot trends” back in May last year which points out the hottest search queries for a particular day. Now they’ve updated Trends once again and have introduced a new numeric scale on the graph and they’ve also added the option to download the numbers to a spreadsheet.

This morning I was just reading an article about how Intel was getting sued, so they were fresh in my mind and I decided to search trends for Intel and AMD since they are competitors. Sure enough, there was a new scale on the side of the graph. Google explains how this new scale works. They say:

You’ll notice a number at the top of the graph as well as on the y-axis of the graph itself. These numbers don’t refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might “scale” to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you’ve entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period.

Take a look at the graph below to see the trend history between Intel and AMD, and notice the scale on the left side:

google trends scale.png

If you decide that you want to take advantage of the new feature to export the page as a CSV file, you’ll need to scroll down to the bottom of the page and look for the plus sign that says “Export this page as a CSV file.” Once you click on the plus sign you’ll have the option of a CSV file with relative scaling or one with fixed scaling.

I chose relative scaling and then chose to open the file with Excel which is shown below:

google trends opened in excel-1.png