3.3 Google trends: Caveats

• Google Search data
  • Behavior = X searching things (typing search terms) on Google
  • What is the data generating process?
• Central questions (cf. Mellon 2013)
  • Who is engaging in this behavior?
  • Why is X engaging in this behavior? (seeking information, directly affected)
  • Who is using Google vs. other search platforms? (socio-demographics, internet penetration)
  • Who is not using search platforms?
  • What are confounding terms? (“jobs” vs. “steve jobs”)
• “Here is an analogy to the problem of unvalidated search data: we are handed a large set of surveys tracking interest in a par-ticular issue over time,but we are not told what population had been sampled or how it was weighted” (Mellon 2013, 280)

References

Mellon, Jonathan. 2013. “Where and When Can We Use Google Trends to Measure Issue Salience?” PS Polit. Sci. Polit. 46 (2): 280–90.