Thank you substackers for your suggestions in my last post ! I plugged in every suggestion given to me and a few more of my own. I’m only going to highlight some where I saw clear trends. I ran 5 year results (expanded to worldwide this time instead of only US) as I want to encapsulate baseline, Covid year 2020 and conjab year 2021 and beyond.
There’s generally three spikes, depending on what search term I am running. I see a big spike in a lot of economic and food shortage concerns in lockdown led April of 2020. So when I run the search term Food banks that is where I see the clearest spike, though it has been increasingly searched for lately. But I hit paydirt on a very specific search query related to them.
Here’s the five year worldwide chart on “Food bank distribution schedule near me”:
This term is very specific in relation to the user’s intent. This is almost certainly someone who goes to food banks for handouts, and has perhaps been turned away due to longer lines, food or staffing shortages, or all of the above. So this person wants to know exactly when to get to the food bank to be the first in line. A broader query such as food banks might indicate people concerned about food shortages but not actually experiencing one. This one does not.
I run into a similar problem when looking up broader search queries for gardening tips, home gardening and the like. People were very interested in these things in lockdown land in the Spring of 2020. But I can’t tell if this searcher is interested in planting azaleas or making their backyard area look perfect now that they’re stuck at home, or if they really want to grow tomatoes and peppers.
I get better results using the search term query “How to grow food.”
You still see a spike in lockdown land, but also a clear upward trend that continues through June of 2022. Some people are figuring out that food does not magically appear on grocery store shelves. There’s also interest in this search term in regions of Africa, probably related to lowered UN food distribution.
Speaking of which some folks are wondering about stockpiling food. Here’s the five year trendline on the search query “How long is rice good?”
Some people are showing an interest in those crazy conspiracy theories that some mega rich evil old white dudes want to rule the world. Searches for cbdc’s are up, but these have only been introduced and talked about for the past few years. Searches for WEF are on a clear rising trend since 2021, as are searches for chief James Bond supervillain “Klaus Schwab”:
Blackrock and Vanguard are on rising trends too, though I am only showing “Blackrock”.
Of course the existential threat du jour that those leaders at the World Economic Forum think we need to be worried about is climate change. That and pandemics, of course. Chicken little the sky is falling! Here’s actual search queries for the term “Climate change.”
I do not know why there was a spike to 100 on this search term in late April of 2022, but I can tell you that long term interest in climate change is very low. This looks exactly like a chart on a celebrity who suddenly makes news headlines for something or other. Interest bobs around at a very low 2 or 3 level and then suddenly spikes. I don’t watch much television so perhaps somebody can explain the spike in late April. Was there some sort of huge Hurricane Katrina esque disaster that had everybody worked up? Climate change is known to have very manipulated search results, so even the search trends could also be off on the term.
I mentioned two other spikes that I see in trends data, so I’ll circle back to that for my last search term. Terms relating to Covid, long Covid, Omicron, immune boosters, and Covid remedies spiked in January of 2022. It is very clear that a lot of people got sick in early 2022. People are over Covid, in the sense that they aren’t looking up much about the term lately. This might indicate that it is really gone, or it could be a normalization of risk, which is good. This is a phenomena where people are all hot and bothered about the danger of something until it becomes an endemic risk of living their day to day life, at which point they stop thinking about it. It doesn’t mean it went away, they just learned to live with it.
The other spike I saw was related to health concerns like myocarditis, which seemed to spike in line with the “vaccine” rollout. In April of 2021 the most jabs were rolling out. That brings me back to the last search term, which was inspired by Alex Berenson’s recent post about his mother.
This is interest in the search term “Xarelto.”
This spiked during the biggest part of the jab rollout period. If you are prescribed a new drug related to some health problem, you are going to generally search for information related to that drug right then. Once it becomes a part of your daily rotation of pills, you probably won’t look it up again.
That has me curious on searches for a host of other common prescription drugs. Any new suggestions?
ok. maybe getting way ahead of the curve here -but that's how I roll ;)
sarracenia purpurea, pitcher plant, natural smallpox cures, vegetables with highest calories, covid vaccines not safe for children (last one obvious but curious to how it trends)
Interesting — there certainly was interest in home gardening in summer ‘20. Plants disappeared at nurseries very quickly. Also interesting there wasn’t another peak this year with all the food shortage worries…
Still “how to grow food” is a thing that sounds like searching for “how to eat” or “how to read” somehow…