From Naive Interest to Shortage During COVID-19: A Google Trends and News Analysis

Google Trends is a web-based tool for analyzing audience interests, tracking the popularity of events, and identifying emerging trends that could become a crowd purchase intention. The tool performs different combinations of trending queries and related topics at a given time and location until structured data, charts, and maps show a tendency, most relevant articles, and interest over time, among others. We consider data from January 2018 to December 2022, representing three typical times of the normal period before the pandemic, the outbreak period, and the widespread period. The analysis explored when people were more interested in certain products and when news about their scarcity appeared. The results showed that the pandemic gradually changed people’s shopping concerns, which spread more throughout the week that the pandemic began. The study case used a validation process that compared real online data obtained from searches with offline data from official news portals of the same period. The comparative analysis established a relationship between trends and the scarcity of Ivermectin and face masks.