Overview
Go to https://trends.google.com/trends/trendingsearches/daily – this lists the top keywords or phrases that are being or have recently been searched on google over the past few days. Choose one that seems interesting to you and click on its number to look at the related recent news articles. Can you get a sense of the story linked to this trend’s popularity? If so, summarize the story. If not, explain why it’s confusing.
Now copy and paste the trend keyword or phrase into the search box on this page: http://www.google.com/trends. This will show you a history of this keyword(s)’ trending - the default view is for the last year, so click the drop-down where it says "Past 12 months" and choose "2004-present" instead (that's as far back as it goes). Spend some time exploring this page and answer the following questions:
- Has this keyword/phrase trended before? In other words, is there a history of peaks and valleys? Or is it a recent phenomenon, meaning the blue line only appears recently?
- Click on the dropdown arrow next to where it says "United States" in the upper lefthand corner and choose "Worldwide." Does this change the graph at all?
- Then scroll down to the "Interest by region" section of the page. Explore the map a bit, and determine what countries, regions and/pr cities this search is most popular in. Why do you think that might be?
- Scroll down to the "Related topics" and "Related queries." Can you determine why this topic might be trending? Note anything else interesting that you learn.
Finally, paste the keyword(s) into the twitter search at https://twitter.com/search-home. Look through the Top Tweets and then click at the top of the page where it says "Latest." Now consider the following questions:
- What types of things are people are saying about this topic? Can you get a sense of the perspectives or opinions people have about it?
- Approximately how often are they posting? Is there a hashtag that seems to be associated with this keyword?
- Are people repeatedly linking to any websites or news articles? What are they?
- Anything else interesting that you noticed?