On a May 8, 2014 post on r/todayilearned, sharing “TIL 15% of searches on Google each day have never been searched before.”, u/Kezzup wrote:
Went and searched “dbw0340tokfkds;a” to keep the statistic up.
The query [dbw0340tokfkds;a], though, was not new to Google, at least not a new search term according to Google Trends.1 Searches (“pulled from a random, unbiased sample of Google searches” / “a largely unfiltered sample of actual search requests”) in May 2014 represented only 40% of the peak volume (“relative to the total number of searches done on Google”) for that search term (“normalised and presented on a scale from 0-100”). The highest volume in the date range available on Google Trends (so starting in 2004) was in March 2004, with January and September 2004; February, April, and July 2005; and November 2006 all reportedly having more searches for that term than u/Kezzup’s month (relative to total volume of searches).
Direct quotes are from Google’s FAQ about Google Trends data; “Basics of Google Trends”; and “Google Trends: Understanding the data.”
Note also that Google Trends cannot support claims of a search being new as it excludes “Searches made by very few people”.
See also:
It could be that this term was always previously in queries with other terms, and u/Kezzup searched it for the first time as the entire query. Google Trends lets you compare terms (and Topics, another matter) that make up parts of queries.↩︎