An announcement was made on the official Google Search blog today about a new addition to Google Trends being rolled out that promises to deliver more accurate results.
Google Trends’ new topic reports are designed to measure interest in people, places and things that users care about. An example Google gives in their blog post is previously if you were to look up search interest in “rice” you could potentially mean the food or a school in Texas called Rice University.
When you start typing a search term into Google Trends you will now see new topic predictions that take into account many variations of the term to provide you with a fairer comparison.
This new feature will also automatically account for several different search terms that probably mean the same thing, such as common misspellings or celebrity nicknames.
Topic reports are currently a beta feature as Google awaits user feedback. However, you can still find data for over 700,000 unique topics as well as slice the data to measure search interest worldwide or in any of these countries: Brazil, France, Germany, India, Italy, UK, and US.
Google says they will continue to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of the data. Over time they will add new topics and expand to support new regions.
