When Google launched its redesigned Google Trends site back in June, you might have thought that it was aimed as a tool primarily for journalists, bloggers, and students. And, you may be right in guessing this. But, you are missing out on a great exploratory tool if you aren’t in any of those categories and decided not to explorer the updated Google Trends. Here’s what you’ll find if you visit google.com/trends.
The first thing you’ll notice are the three “featured stories” going across near the top of your browser window. Selecting one of these featured stories leads you to a new page that provides categories of in-depth information. These categories may include news stories, a list of people pertinent to the story, information about geographical differences in interest about the story, a timeline of interest, and a list of related topics.
A list of “trending stories” followed the featured stories. These are generally newsworthy stories that have developed in the past 24 hours and are continuing to generate search interest. Selecting a news item from the list of trending stories results in an in-depth page too.
However, you aren’t limited to Google’s featured and trending stories. You can search for any topic or set of topics that have generated sufficient search interest for Google to produce meaningful related information. With Microsoft Windows 10 set for release in just a few weeks on July 29, 2015, it seemed like a good topic to throw to Google Trends. I tried a few of the Google Trends story tuning options for this search. First, I limited the search region to just the United States instead of the default region of the entire world. Next, I reduced the time frame to searches in the past 12 months.
