So, earlier this morning, I was perusing Google Trends as I planned on writing a piece about the Charlottesville riots that occurred on August 12th. I took screenshots of the top 20 search listings for Sunday on the "Trending Searches" section. About five hours later, I went back and scrolled through the page where I took the screenshots, earlier.. I was surprised to see that there were differences between the set from earlier and the new set that I was just seeing.
Two of these differences were really notable, in my opinion. The first, being a more subtle change, was the movement of the search for "Heather Heyer" up to #1 (the most searched-for term of the day) from the #3 spot. The second change, and probably the one with the most implicit implications, was the replacement of "Terry McAuliffe" with "Steve Bannon" for the #18 spot.
Original #1
Original #2
Final #1
Final #2
The average value for "Heather Heyer" was 37 as compared with the average value of "Terry McAuliffe" which was 3. So, according to this, "Terry McAuliffe" was searched for a total of 8.1% the number of times that "Heather Heyer" was searched for. If this percentage is then multiplied with the total number of searches for "Heather Heyer" (>500,000) then a result of 40,500 searches is obtained for "Terry McAuliffe." That new estimated total search value is almost 25% less than what the original Google total search value was for "Terry McAuliffe" (>50,000).
It is hard to definitively tell what exactly is going on here without access to all of the underlying Google data. However, what is easy to tell is that this instance of potential data tampering of Google Trends warrants increased scrutiny, going forward.