Google Trends
A free official tool that plots how interest in a search term rises and falls over time, globally or within a chosen region.
Analogy Mental model
A thermometer for public demand. It will not tell you how many people have a fever, but it shows precisely which season fever spikes and which city has it worst.
In practice What you actually do
Three uses earn their keep: compare two near-synonyms to see which one your target market actually types; widen the window to five years to judge whether a category is growing or shrinking; and read the rising related queries at the bottom for breakout terms that are climbing fast.
Where people get burned Pitfalls
The vertical axis is not a count. A value of one hundred marks the peak of that particular query in that particular window, and fifty means half the interest of the peak, not fifty searches. Treating it as volume leads to badly wrong forecasts.
This entry was written in English from the Chinese original, not machine-translated. Read the Chinese version →