Super Bowl Answers Film Data Methodology

Google Trends Data is a timely and revealing mirror of the world, reflecting a fuller, and often unexpected, picture. Billions of stories exist in Trends data and one interesting way of looking at them is by rhythmic patterns that present themselves over time, reflecting our cultural routines, celebrations and habits. For example, searches for “best movies” peak every year during Christmas week, or “pizza near me” peaks every Wednesday (U.S.).

For Super Bowl LIV, Google is celebrating the historic cultural sporting event with a film called “A little help before the Super Bowl”, a smile-worthy story that answers the questions searched year-after-year around the big game.

The data-driven concept is rooted in 10 years (2009-2019) of questions Americans search for every year on Super Bowl Sunday. It turns out that even though the teams, host city, and halftime performers change every year, the questions we ask, such as “how to make guacamole” or “how much is a super bowl ring worth” stay the same.

For a question to qualify for the film, it had to have U.S. search interest every year on Super Bowl day from 2009 to 2019.

Data Methodology for most searched insights in About.google editorial

Using internal Google tools, we calculated the “most searched” person, movement, or moment in each category¹ using anonymous and aggregated Google Trends data samples from January 01, 2004² to January 19, 2020 in the United States.

We calculated “most searched” by:

1. The “most searched” category¹ is represented by a Knowledge Graph topic, we calculated³ the entity⁴ with the most search interest in (entity⁴ + topic).
   1. Example: To find the most searched “interception,” we rank search interest of (person’s name + interception topic).

¹ Category is a reference to a career title, an action, event, or achievement.
² Data is dated back to January 1, 2004 because that’s the date Google started tracking Search trends.
³ Calculations of search interest are quantified using Google’s proprietary internal tools.
⁴ Entity is referring to the person, moment or movement.