Google Trends is free, widely accessible, and genuinely useful. Most investment teams looking at search data have opened it at some point. But there is a significant gap between what Google Trends provides and what institutional investors need from search data as a systematic signal. This post covers what Google Trends does well, where it falls short for investment use, and what a more complete alternative looks like.
What Google Trends actually gives you
Google Trends provides relative search interest for a keyword or topic, indexed on a 0-100 scale. The peak of interest in a selected time w