According to SEMrush, a search engine marketing agency, the price of Bitcoin has a 91% correlation to it's volume of Google searches.

What does that mean?

It means that recently the number of Google searches for "Bitcoin" go up and down with the price of Bitcoin.

That probably isn't that surprising when you really think about it as you would expect that as the price goes higher more and more people are interested in it and as it goes down people are less interested.

Either way, it is an interesting talking point.

How was this study conducted?

SEMrush drew from a database of 120 million US keyword searches that were linked to Bitcoin or Bitcoin related terms.

Bitcoin-related searches being searches like:

"Bitcoin"

"Bitcoin news"

"Bitcoin price"

"Bitcoin value"

The total number of Bitcoin and Bitcoin related searches was estimated to be around 51,400,000 over the course of the last year.

According to the data, the price of Bitcoin in US dollars rose and fell largely in tandem with the number of search requests.

In fact, it moved in tandem roughly 91% of the time.

Is the study merely confirming the obvious?

Possibly.

As mentioned above, it seems fairly obvious that as Bitcoin becomes more expensive, more people tend to search for it online to see how it is doing.

When it is going down or standing still the searches tend to go down and mimic that price action, which would seem fairly intuitive.

Either way though, it is interesting to note the correlation and see that the actual numbers support what me might have already been assuming to be the case.

Some statistics:

Bitcoin searches have gone up 450% since April of 2017.

During that time the price of Bitcoin went from roughly $1,076 to a high of roughly $5,000 just a few weeks ago.

Since June 2017, the number of searches for Ethereum (another virtual currency) is roughly equal to the number of searches for Bitcoin.

Currently, Bitcoin is trading around $4,024 per coin.

The Million Dollar Question:

Do these searches lead or trail the price of Bitcoin?

Wouldn't it be great if we could use Google searches as a predictor of price using this data going forward?

It would be beyond great!

Sadly, that likely won't be the case as it wasn't stated whether this data predicted or trailed the price of Bitcoin.

However, it is probably safe to say that the most likely answer is that it trails the price of Bitcoin, likely for some of the reasons stated above.

Thanks for reading and hope you found this study at least somewhat interesting like I did.

Stay informed my friends.

Sources:

http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-price-correlation-google-search-2017-9

Image Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/6aiked/bitcoin_google_search_trend_vs_bitcoin_value_oc/