Food trends were infered from 12 years, 2004-2016, of US Google Trends Score, which is a metric developed by google which normalizes search volume.
Trends adjusts seach data to make comparison between terms easier.
Search results are proportionate to the time and location of a query:As seen in the animation above, the plots are very dense with data.
The focus on visualization is on highlighting seasonal and yearly trends. Annotations on the plots offer hypothesis to justify certain pronounced patterns and it is possible to slice the data by year in a separate window.
Google has produced many other visualizations of it's search trends such as Google Trends Explore but none of them has the same compeling use of interactive visualizations or sharing features. It only takes a few clicks to share insights on Twitter, Facebook or to generate the image above.
The visualization style makes it very easy to spot regular seasonal trends across years.
The use of color to display a variable with 12 categories, and the color choice, makes it hard to spot non-obvious yearly trends.
Normal Vision
Tritanopia Vision
For people with normal vision it is not easy to distinguish the yearly trends in detail because of the color choice. The task becomes substantially harder for some types of colorblindness.
However, because of the good use of shades, it is still possible to distinguish the general yearly trends.
Google does not provide detailed information about what goes into the normalization of the Google Trends. Therefore, it is difficult to interpret discrepancies between the inferences from the Trends and insights from other data sources.
For example, the carrot consumption trends infered from the Rhythm of Food and the USA are conflicting.
Author: Pedro Borges
Class: CS424 - Data Visualization