Source: Google Trends. Tools: Python and Canva

Searching for a country in order to look for the score may help inflate the search index but other data reveals that people truly are interested in reading more about each country. For example, the main Wikipedia article for many participating countries received record visitors during the World Cup.

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I wonder what that Japan spike can be attributed to

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The 2011 earthquake and tsunami

Probably the earthquake and tsunami in 2011 (or, less likely: maybe their women's world cup win later that year).

The Americans don't give a shit or maybe they just goggle/d soccer? Idk

This is global interest so it not only depends on the Americans

What does the different coloring mean?

Darker blue highlights the countries that did get a record search interest during the world cup

What do the values mean? I thought they were a metric of interest for a country compared to that country’s times of highest and lowest number of searches where 100 is the time when it was highest and 0 is lowest. However, I noticed that not all countries have an index at 0.

The values mean exactly what you say. All countries have indexes from 0 to 100.

I do see the 100 indices for every country, but most of them don’t have an index of 0.

My guess is that the index is calculated from searches since the birth of Google and not just searches since 2004.

It is the clearest among the indices. Solid gray line

That’s the line that acts as the border for the graph. I’m saying that each country’s data never reaches 0.

Yea, no country reaches 0.

I’m surprised that many people made a typo when searching for Saudi Arabia

Typo was me 😅

I just love the slow build of Ghana because it's very likely related to the Ghanaian funeral dance video.

100% is the highest search interest, 0 is zero search interest. Most countries don't have their search interest change by a factor 100.

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That isn’t how my interpretation of the index would work. 100 would the highest interest in that country’s history and 0 would be when interest is at its lowest in the country’s history.

Arbitrary example: the U.S.’s lowest interest was when it was searched 2,000 times in a week. The index of 0 would correspond to that value. The U.S.’s highest interest is when it was searched 150,000 times in a week. This would be its 100 index. All other indexes would just correspond to somewhere between 2,000 and 150,000 weekly searches.

You can try to interpret whatever you want, but that's not how Google's charts work.

Ah, that is what you said, and I just ignored it. That makes sense. The range is from no search activity to highest amount of search activity for that country. Thank you.

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Well, what about the "World" Series?

Is the first peak for Wales the 2016 Euros?

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Also for Spain and France : summer vacation.

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I assumed the question was rhetorical but then I realized to my horror that a 14 year-old would legitimately have no idea.

what happened in cameroon?

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This is what I was wondering. I was like, is everyone just looking up scores or looking for streams?

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I'm pretty sure some of the previous spikes were also World Cup related, like Croatia's looks like 2018

Some of them, yes. Brazil too.

The closest thing to it is the protests they had

It's 2004-2022, so the slow build isn't attributed to that. But the spike just before the world cup is probably because of that video

This is how you tell apart the important countries from those who are only googled during a world cup

X axes should have ticks for world cup years if possible to make it easier to read.

I’m curious why so many “developed” or might be more accurate to say western nations have an overall decline from 2004 to today? I’m thinking of Switzerland, Wales, France, Germany, Spain, Mexico, Canada, USA as examples.

I say western might be more accurate instead of developed because South Korea and most of South America don’t seem to follow that overall downward trajectory.

Is it just illustration of countries where the internet became more ubiquitous sooner? And we were all just googling ourselves so to speak? And then as internet access became more widespread in other countries it sort of evened out? But the timeline only goes back to 2004, would have thought it needed to go back just a few years further to show that. Then again I live in the US and didn’t have internet in my house constantly until around 2005, not because it wasn’t available but because it just wasn’t part of my life when I was in my 20’s and never at home and I hadn’t grown up with it always being there.

I don’t know, might not even be thinking about the chart trends in the right way or reading too much into it. Would be curious what others think or if they noticed the similar charts for some nations.

Why does france and spain do so weird stuff

I guess everyone already knew what Canada is?

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It must be that 0 is literally 0 searches and 100 is the all time high

There seems to be some seasonality

Your data doesn't say what you claim it does.

What makes you say that?

the subtitle reveals part of the reason: only in half of the countries there was record search interest in 2022.

secondly: there is no way to be sure that it's predominantly World Cup which generated the record interest. For some of those countries it surely did, for others - we can't really be certain. And I'm quite comfortably sure that for Poland the cause for record interest has little to do with World Cup - it's mostly war in Ukraine.

What your data says is at most that World Cup, among other events, might generate increased global interest.

The war on Ukraine has been going on for almost a year now. Also, many countries that did not have a record search during this world cup do have record search during other world cup editions like Uruguay, Brazil and Germany.