Trending hobbies during the pandemic

This past year has seen a rising interest in long-lost hobbies due to shelter-in-place, social distancing, and lockdown orders. Google Trends and Polygraph charted the hobbies that saw the biggest spikes each day of the year.

I’m surprised that sourdough or bread-making is on there, but maybe they didn’t fall under the hobby definition they used.

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News story lifespan charts

A wideout view of the news cycle can look like a series of rise and falls. Something captures the general public’s attention, and then it fades off. Thank you, next. This collaboration between Schema Design and Google Trends charts search volume for news stories and aligns them by their peaks, so that you can see these rise and falls.

Transparent areas overlaid on each other show an “average” trend, and the more irregular shapes are made obvious because they stand out from the rest.

See also the simpler view by Axios, who contributed stories to the project.

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Google Trends in real-time

Google Trends in real-time

Google Trends used to be a place where you looked up trends for historical searches, over the span of several years. You can still do that, but they recently shifted to a focus on more current search activity. Get a list of "trending stories", maps of where the searches occur, and the familiar time series plots that show search over time. Select a trend, and you get a page with news story links along with charts.

Pretty nifty. I'm surprised we're only now just seeing this from Google.

Oh, and you can download data for some of the trends if you so please. Too bad it's not for all searches.

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