Predicting future search trends: Ninjas Vs Cheese

Last week Google quietly added an interesting new feature to its Insights for Search tool, predictions of future search trends. If you don’t already use Insights, you should, it’s a useful tool for monitoring search trends in order to get a good picture of how consumer interest in specific brands and topics rises and falls over time.

Google’s latest improvement to the service, based on some very clever science which I won’t try to bluff my way through, enables you to see what the future consumer interest in brands and topics could be.

There are a couple of points to make about this. Firstly, for a lot of searches you don’t need a sophisticated algorithm to predict future trends, because the annual pattern is so consistent that it’s easy to make an educated guess about how the chart will look for the next twelve months. For example, the trend for the search term “cheese” is highly predictable, so most people could figure out the pattern for themselves.

 

Secondly, there’s no way the prediction algorithm can account for unexpected events, since it relies purely on past data to extrapolate future trends, so like all predictions it’s only of limited value. However, it may well prove to be helpful for planning, once we’ve ascertained how accurate its predictions are for the less obvious trends.  For example, the search trend for the keyword “ninjas” is much less obvious than that of “cheese” and this is where the tool could be really useful, in spotting more complex trends and patterns that a human observer would not be able to identify.

 

This is obviously going to take a little time – we need to record Google’s predictions for search trends now, and revisit them in future to see how accurate they were. If they stand the test of time, then we’ve got a powerful new tool at our disposal.

Latest Posts

Instagram Rings is a new and exciting award that celebrates creators who take bold, creative risks and push the boundaries of content on the platform. Instead of focusing on follower counts or financial benchmarks, it honors originality, cultural impact, and the spirit of experimentation. Winners receive…
Read More
From Oasis-fuelled nostalgia to TikTok Shop, here’s how UK culture drives baskets. Build for durable shifts, ride bubbles wisely.
Read More
Halloween can be a gift for social teams: bold colour, playful typography, and a built-in excuse to try weirder ideas. Below is a designer’s take on where the real opportunities are this season for a creative agency. Start sooner than you think The “spooky season” isn’t confined to the last…
Read More