The Human Response to COVID-19: Searching for Answers

Analysing Google trends to examine how lockdown, isolation and the reality of pandemic have changed our search habits

In this article I’ll be investigating Google search data. The analysis will look at what we as a society are searching for more often and how it reflects our new reality.

The Data

All the data presented here was downloaded from the Google Trends website which shows, for any given search term, how often it has been searched for, over time.

Note that the data for any specific search term is given as an index, with 100 being the most traffic ever received for that search term. This means that two graphs cannot be compared as they do not show actual search numbers and are rather a reflection of how the popularity changes over time.

All graphs were produced using the R programming language

The Virus Itself

To begin with, we can look at how searches for the term ‘coronavirus’ have grown over the last year, worldwide.

This can be used as a proxy for the spread of the virus itself, although it may be more accurate to say it reflects the spread of panic instead.