[Epistemic status: low. You tell me if you think this works.]

Commenter no_bear_so_low has been doing some great work with Google Trends recently – see for example his Internet searches increasingly favour the left over the right wing of politics or Googling habits suggest we are getting a lot more anxious.

I wanted to try some similar things, and in the process I learned that this is hard. Existing sites on how to use Google Trends for research don’t capture some of the things I learned,