New Google Trends Topic Reports Designed To Deliver More Accurate Results

Google Trends is rolling out new topic reports designed to deliver more accurate results, as well as offer topic predictions within the reports. Using Google’s example, now when a user searches for “rice” in a trends report, they will see topic predictions like “Rice University” and “Rice Cereal” to better qualify the search topic.

To illustrate how the reports have improved, Google showed what a report comparing “Harvard” and “rice” looked like before the new updates, when the search term “rice” would have pulled data for a number of rice related terms.

Now, according to the announcement, the new Google Topic Report (shown below), “makes it easy to do a fairer comparison,” by offering up the prediction for “Rice University” and only pulling data related to that specific search term.

Google says it has updated its Trends Reports so that different search terms meaning the same thing will be measured accordingly:

So, when you measure interest in “Gwyneth Paltrow (actress)” our algorithms count many other searches that mean the same thing “Gweneth Paltrow,” “Gwen Paltro,” etc. As our systems improve, we may even count searches like “Lead actress in Iron Man.”

As a beta feature, Google claims the new Trends Reports include data for 700,000 unique topics, with the ability to measure the search interest data worldwide or in Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, UK and the US, with more topics and regions to come.