Page 28 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle
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28 CHAPTER 3 INVESTIGATING THE MESSY MIDDLE
Are you not entertained? The slow demise of ‘free’
In the last chapter, we discussed the strange intersection of “best” and
“cheap” in our search data. But these two modifiers weren’t all we
were searching for back then. For the first decade and a half of the new
millennium, it seems that we were keen to get something for nothing.
Even more than “best” and “cheap”, in the 2000s “free” was king (figure 1).
Figure 1
cheap best free
Search term Search term Search term
100
75
SEARCH INTEREST 50
25
0
2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2020
The proportion of UK searches containing “free” or “cheap” has been in decline, but the proportion containing “best”
has been increasing.
Data source: Google Trends, United Kingdom, 1st January 2004–1st January 2020, All categories, Web Search
