Google Trends launches Pakistan election page

KARACHI: Search engine giant, Google, has launched a Google Trends Pakistan General Election page to help media outlets and people access data about what political searches are trending in the country as it heads into general elections next month.

Google Trends is an innovative tool released under the Google News Initiative for informed political coverage. It contains data related to top “search queries, topics, and interests in parties contesting the elections”. A unique feature of this tool is that “all the charts from the Google Trends page are embeddable on any site and will continue to update even after they are placed on a media outlet’s site”.

Google Trends does not focus on the volume of searches. The trends data is normalized and presented on a scale from 0-100. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means there was not enough data for this term.

Though the Daily Search Trends and Realtime Search Trends features are not available in Pakistan, users can go to the Explore page to search for the data related to specific terms. At the time of the filing of this story, Google Trends offered the following data regarding people’s search interest in selected political parties over the last 14 days (till January 15, 2024).

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf tops the search list, appearing in 77 per cent of the total searches. The term had a score of 100 on January 12, 2024 and started to decline since then. On January 15, the term’s relevance had dropped to 68. Further data shows that internet users from the erstwhile ‘Federally Administered Tribal Areas’ showed greater search interest in the political party. The top 5 related queries along with the primary search include: “pti website”, “pti tickets 2024 list”, “Insaf.pk”, “pti nazriati”, and “pti website 2024”.

The Pakistan Muslim League-N comes second with 14 per cent of the total searches. The term had a score of 100 on January 11, 2024. It dropped to 43 on January 16, 2024. Interest for the search term was greater in Punjab, followed by Islamabad Capital Territory and Gilgit-Baltistan. The top 5 related queries with the search term include: “pmln tickets list”, “pmln tickets Punjab”, “pmln Punjab tickets list 2024”, “pti tickets”, and “pti tickets 2024”.

The Pakistan Peoples Party stands third with 3.0 per cent of the total searches. The term had a score of 100 on January 1, 2024 and dropped to 41 on January 4, 2024. It regained its popularity on January 5 with a score of 88. On January 10 (the last available date), the search term had a score of 85. Users from Gilgit-Baltistan showed more interest in the search term. The top 5 related queries with the search term include “ppp party”, “ppp ticket holders list 2023”, “after how many years, Pakistan got its first constitution?”, “which pact was signed between Pakistan and India after war of 1965?”, and “pti twitter”.

Google Trends also provides insight into internet users’ search interest in elections over a period of one year. The term ‘Election contest’ had a score of 73 between January 15 and 21, 2023 (the PTI’s Punjab and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa assemblies were dissolved around the same time). It dropped in popularity and then regained relevance between May 14 and May 20, 2023 (a few days after the May 9 incident) with a score of 51. On January 14, the term had a score of 100. Google Trends also shows that search interest in cost of living reached a 12-year high in Pakistan in 2023. Interest in economic topics, tax and economy, had a score of 56 and 13 respectively between January 7 and 13, 2024. ‘How to control inflation in Pakistan?’ remained a top question in the last three months.

It further says that Pakistan was among the top 10 countries searching for foreign policy in 2023. People’s interest in searching for immigration peaked in January 2024. In April 2023, interest in climate change had a score of 86 (highest for the year 2023). Interest in foreign policy remained constant with a score between 5 and 9. Internet users also searched topics related to healthcare and corruption.