More realtime data on Google Trends

Google Trends can be window into the world, giving us a peek into what people are searching for—whether it’s elections, music, sports or games. Now you can see the world in realtime through more lenses: News, Shopping, Images and YouTube. We’re opening up more data to show what people in the world are looking for, as they’re looking for it—whether it’s just out of curiosity, to write a story or something else.

And it’s really easy to do: say you’re curious about search interest in Taylor Swift following the recent release of her latest album. You now have the option to explore that data in different ways, like finding the related videos that people are searching for on YouTube.

How it works

As you can see, the topic of “American singer-songwriter” comes up—that’s the one you want to click on, otherwise it will only look for searches for the words “Taylor” and “Swift.”

That takes you to a page like this, which shows search interest in Taylor, worldwide. You can then change the time range to within the last seven days and the geography to the United States. That’s now showing search interest in the U.S. for the past week, and looks like this.

But that’s just web search. Click on the button on the right and more options appear:

We search in different ways on different platforms. So, when you look at the search on YouTube, you can see the spike in searches for video of Taylor’s performance on “The Tonight Show.”

But switch it to Google Images and you can see a 700 percent spike in searches for “Saturday Night Live,” after her performance on the show.

You can also use the tool to see where interest is strongest (in this case, Utah and Nebraska are top states for YouTube searches):

Explore the Google Trends site and see more of how the world searches for Taylor, her music or anything that you’re interested in. And you can read more about how Trends data works here.