In March 2017, Willy Woo posted this incredibly insightful article on Coindesk: Using Google Trends to Estimate Bitcoin's User Growth.
1 year on, let's see whether it still holds true:
But for how much longer? Will we start seeing a divergence? And if so, what conclusions would we draw from it:
Interest != Price
It's safe to assume google is used primarily by people thinking of getting some BTC, or fairly new BTC users either looking at the price, or wanting to read media articles.
It's a little bit like immigrating to a new country; at first you're constantly searching for conversion rates, but after a while you no longer need to. That or users switch over to dedicated apps.
As a protocol
BTC is often compared to TCP. This is a graph of TCP searches versus (estimated) user adoption over time.
Which makes a lot of sense. Users searching "TCP" would only be technical users wanting to know more about the protocol. Not the average user. This correlation does not work for protocols. In fact it may even be inversely correlated: the greater the adoption (or lack thereof) the less searches are made.
As an asset
Let's try charting searches for Gold versus its price:
We can see some correlation, especially during spikes. The search volume for Gold remained fairly stable, however there was a steady growth, resulting in a 4x in price.
Expect the correlation to weaken - and that's a good thing
As time goes on, I'm hoping to see this search versus user adoption to become less correlated. As the Coin Telegraph reported, 64% of Germans are aware of BitCoin. I would like to know how many Indians or Chinese are aware of Bitcoin; the numbers may be surprisingly high, too.
To me a smooth yet steady search volume would signify a broader adoption. After all, before you leave your home, you don't google USD. Before getting into your car, you don't google "tarmac". Because these are now simply the things the world is made of.
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