Page 26 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle

3

Investigating the

messy middle

Searching for clues in Google Trends

With a hypothesis now in place, our next step was to return to the Google
Trends data to see if we could find real-world evidence of behaviour changing
over time on the web.

At a high level, people use search to look for information about a particular
subject or object. But because the amount of available information is so vast,
searches are often modified with an additional word or phrase that describes

what it is the searcher wants to know about the thing they’re searching for. In
our search data, fads, trends, and memes blip in and out of popularity, but the
way people use search has slowly increased in range and complexity over time.

If you’re looking for a laptop, you might prefer to narrow down your search by
modifying it to “best laptop” or “cheap laptop”, or even “laptops near me”. The
modifiers people use can’t always be neatly broken down into exploration or
evaluation, but if we trend the use of these sorts of terms, we can find clues

that illuminate how behaviour has changed.

For those not familiar with Google Trends, here’s a quick primer on how it works,
and a few clarifying notes on what the charts used in this chapter represent.