By Philip Lelyveld – Here are two plots from Google Trends, which gives the trend line for a specific search term. In this case the plot shows the trend for “3D” worldwide (“all regions”) and the U.S.
All Regions
| TV makers bet big on 3D, payoff uncertain Reuters – Jan 7 2010 |
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| 3D TV Daily Mail – Mar 10 2010 |
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| Sony Move to 3D Brisbane Times – Jun 16 2010 |
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| Panasonic aiming for half of Europe’s 3D TV market Reuters Canada – Sep 2 2010 |
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| Sony: 3D TV for everyone Washington Post – Jan 6 2011 |
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LG unveils 3D smartphone
—————— North America
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Search Volume Index
In relative mode, the data is scaled to the average search traffic for your term (represented as 1.0) during the time period you’ve selected. For example, if you entered the term dogs, the graph you’d see would be scaled to the average of all search traffic for dogs from January 2004 to present. But if you chose a specific time frame – say 2006 – the data would then appear relative to the average of all search traffic for dogs in 2006. Then, let’s suppose that you notice a spike in the graph to 3.5; this spike means that traffic is 3.5 times the average for 2006.
Is the News reference volume graph scaled?
No. The graph is for illustrative purposes, and simply shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories.

