Google Trends has long been a popular way to find out how much interest there is in a given topic, but until now, it was also a relatively simple tool. It just looked at how often people would search for a keyword over time. Now that Google has its Knowledge Graph and a way better understanding of what a given word actually means, it can also make Google Trends smarter and that’s what it’s doing today.
Google Trends will automatically give you type-ahead search suggestions that are based on topics, not keywords. This means you can now easily tell Google you are looking for trends related to Rice University and not just rice the cereal. In total, Google says, Trends now understands 700,000 unique topics, ranging from Barack Obama to football (soccer) to Hayao Miyazaki.
This new system is also more forgiving when it comes to misspellings and “may even count searches like ‘Lead actress in Kill Bill'” when you’re searching for Uma Thurman.
The data can also be sliced geographically, but only if you live in the U.S., U.K., Brazil, France, Germany, India or Italy. These are also the countries and languages where Knowledge Graph is available, though Russian, which has Knowledge Graph support, isn’t getting this tool for Google Trends yet.