Google Trends Comparison Paper

One of the most popular topics of conversation right now is the 2016 presidential race. The two main candidates, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, are creating a radical divide in the nation. With this divide comes protests, attacks, violence, and hatred. Google Trends is a website that measures the trends in certain subjects on the internet. The main purpose in Google Trends is to show spikes and trends in certain topics but without any explanation for why these trends spike and at which rate they spike. So the readers are left with the task of assigning reason to why these trends occur. With this tool you can compare topics and see what is trending around the world, so I used Google Trends to compare Presidential Candidates and the term “Protest”.

This condensed the data down to make the chart way easier to understand, and easier to pick trends out of. With this version of the graph I can see that both search terms have their peaks over each other and that "Protest" is on top a majority of the time. To narrow the terms down even further I changed the categories filter to display only search results relating to the law and government. When the search was in all categories the protest line had 3 major peaks; it has only two with the law and government filter applied. The two lines constantly peak over the other but right now the protest line is dramatically falling but it is still over the line for presidential candidates. If we start from the beginning of the graph we can interpret why things are the way they are. The first peak is in protests and occurs between November 8th, 2015 and November 14th, 2015. . One incident that happened between those two dates is the University of Missouri protest. The protest ended with the resignation of the president of the university. This incident could be one reason for a spike in the search term

The first major peak for presidential candidates and the next significant point on the graph lays between February 28th to March 5th, 2016. On February 27th there were many events relating to the presidential candidates such as the Constitution Party presidential nominees and the Virginia Presidential Candidate filing. The next spot on the graph is the largest and most influential point on the whole graph. Between July 2nd and July 9th, 2016 the line for protests is at its maximum. Google Trends scales all of the search results so that the highest search period gets a 100 and everything else is below that. This line is at 100, the next highest point on the line is a 57, so a major event must have happened between these two dates. Just before July 2nd is a major event in the history of the United Kingdom. The event was the Brexit vote for the United Kingdom to secede from the United Nations. This event left millions of British and others around the world in shock. Why would the United Kingdom choose to leave? Are they planning something? The next significant point on the chart is between July 24th and July 30th , 2016 in favor of the presidential