Page 45 - Decoding Decisions ~ Making sense of the messy middle
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45 CHAPTER 3 INVESTIGATING THE MESSY MIDDLE
‘Best’ and ‘cheap’ around the world
Although we need to account for how the meaning of words can differ
between categories, many of the trends we identified in UK data are also
visible in other geographies and languages.
This is how the pattern of “best”, “cheap”, and “free” looks for all searches
globally in English (below).
Figure 19
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 worldwide searches containing “free” or “cheap” has been in decline, but the proportion containing
“best” has been increasing.
Similar long-term trends for “best” and “cheap” are also visible when we
translate those terms into the native languages of many other countries:
Data sources: Google Trends, Worldwide, 1st January 2004–1st January 2020, All categories, Web Search
