Google Trends allows you to see the topics people are—or aren’t—following, almost in real time. Journalists can use this information to explore potential story ideas, and can also feature Trends data within news stories to illustrate a general level of interest in, say, a political candidate, social issue or event.

The Google Trends homepage features clustered topics that Google detects are related and trending together on either Search, Google News, or YouTube. Trending Stories are collected based on Google’s Knowledge Graph technology, which gathers search information from those three Google platforms to detect when stories are trending based on the relative spike in volume and the absolute volume of searches.

The Trends homepage indicates what topics are trending right now, which can be helpful when choosing a story to write about. To explore how Google data can be used to tell stories, click one of the examples under Latest Stories and Insights. 

You can compare up to five groups of terms at one time and up to 25 terms in each group.  Group terms together by using a + symbol.

This could be useful to compare election candidates, or to look at nominees in an awards show.

If you enter a search term using non-Latin characters, you’ll see data from all countries or regions that use those characters. For example, if you enter 選挙, the Japanese characters for election, your results will not include much data from the United States.

You can easily compare searches of the same term in different languages. Using the election example, just enter search term 選挙  in the first search box, then enter election in the + Compare  box.

On the results page under the search bar, use the Worldwide and Past 12 months dropdowns to refine your exploration further by region and/or time period.

Information on how to better understand Google Trends data and read its charts can be found in our Google Trends: Interpreting the Data tutorial, and also in the Trends Help Center accessible from the menu in the upper left of the homepage.