Originally Posted by
Tourist in MSN
... but it looks like the google search data is USA only.
There's a drop down on the left side that let's you choose between several dozen countries as well as a composite selection of "Worldwide". Given their lack of understanding that "bikepacking" is equivalent to "bike packing", I'd have to wonder how they handle a term like "bikepacking" on a global chart as I doubt they are quantifying the, for example, Turkish or French terms for bikepacking as the English equivalent of the term bikepacking. If I were to guess..their worldwide chart simply quantifies people searching in, for example, France or Turkey using the English word, bikepacking.
The 2004 thing is rather mysterious. I just did a search for "backpacking" and 2004 had the most hits. I searched for "needlepoint"....and 2004 had the max number of hits. "Horseracing"...and 2004 had the greatest number of hits. "Culinary pig brains"..June 2020 was the max. From all this I can conclude the peak pandemic period created a huge serge in interest in bicycles as well as eating hog brains.
Hard to say if these charts mean much without understanding specifically how they are obtaining data, how they preprocess it, and how they are working it up. The (apparent) math they are using is straightforward. They normalize the data to the max number of hits. (Example.. the term "bikepacking" had the largest number of hits, say 5M, in 2004. In 2009 they had 2.6M hits on bikepacking. The plot point for 2004 is then 100%. The plot point for 2009 is then (2.6M/5M) * 100= 52%.
There's good
potential for interesting data here in general. No doubt...Google has entire departments of analysts working up the data they generate and are selling it in various formats.
(..wandering off topic here..but everyone has heard of their "credit score". The credit score is just one of dozens (and dozens) of often obtuse "scores" that follow folks based on how they interact with the world. The credit score is just one of the scores that has bubbled to the surface and people are well aware of it. Not tin hat conspiracy theory stuff..this is the real world.)