Google describes its Trends tool as "one of the world’s biggest journalistic datasets" and the redesign is aimed at helping journalists create stories using the data in the tool.
Journalists aside, Google Trends remains a great tool for anyone wanting to research the popularity of topics over time, or to discover new, emerging themes, giving as it does an insight into search trends worldwide.
The new design puts editorial data-based stories to the fore and the revamped tool has many ways to cut and explore the data.
New features include:
- A revamped Trending searches section, showing what is trending in search right now, both daily and minute-by-minute.
- A new section for Google Trends data stories curated by the News Lab team and Google data visualizations from newsroom designers worldwide.
- Easy access to Year in Search data going back to 2001.
- New infographic types such as intensity maps to compare different topics.
Visualizations from designers around the world working with Google News Lab continue to provide stylish ways of analysing search data.
Source: Flourish
Google said many of the changes were based on user feedback. Old favourites such as real time and daily Trends pages, as well as the Explore page, are still available.
For more details see Google's blog post.
