Simulating the inconsistencies of Google Trends data

[EN] Google Trends (GT) allows users to obtain reports of the evolution of the popularity of searchers made through the Google Search engine. Its main output is the Search Volume Index (SVI), a relative measure of the popularity of a term, which is computed using a sample of the searches. Due to the...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Cebrián, Eduardo, Domenech, Josep|||0000-0002-7302-5810
Formato: capítulo de livro
Fecha de publicación:2022
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/189564
Acesso em linha:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/189564
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Google Trends
Consistency
Measurement Error
Online data
Descrição
Resumo:[EN] Google Trends (GT) allows users to obtain reports of the evolution of the popularity of searchers made through the Google Search engine. Its main output is the Search Volume Index (SVI), a relative measure of the popularity of a term, which is computed using a sample of the searches. Due to the sampling error, the reports are not completely consistent, as the same query produces different time series that can widely change from day to day. This paper simulates the process of generating the SVI time series in the same way as GT does. By doing this, it has been shown that the sampling error could be an important issue if the popularity of the term under study is relatively low. Averaging multiple extractions from GT can only partially alleviate this.