About a year ago, Google searches for “Bitcoin” surpassed searches relating to Donald Trump. Now that Google has published its 2018 year-in-review of search terms, “What is Bitcoin” is among the top questions that people are asking Google, at least in the US. Last year, the largest cryptocurrency ranked in two categories globally, both in general news searches and “how to buy Bitcoin.”
More people wanted to know what Bitcoin was than people wanted to know about DACA, the administrative policy of Barack Obama to give a form of amnesty to those who were brought to the United States illegally as children.
People are still more interested in Bitcoin than they are the Russian collusion investigation which is ongoing and yet to be resolved, more than two years into the presidency of Donald Trump.
The downturn in interest in crypto searches goes along with the declining fiat value of the market over the same period of time. Bitcoin was several times as valuable a year ago as it is today. Mass media reporting on the subject of cryptocurrency certainly contributed a great deal. Another factor to take into account is that as people learn about crypto, their likelihood to search about the flagship cryptocurrency again is lessened a great deal. It’s safe to say the market has added hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of participants.
For its part, Google has never yet played a significant role in Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. None of their payment apps accept cryptocurrency. One thing that can be said for it, however, is that its Play store is much more permissive as regards the submission and publication of Bitcoin-related apps and other contents, than the iTunes Store, which has repeatedly generated news about censorship of crypto-related topics.
Google Trends doesn’t provide the gross number of searches, but Google is the top search engine in the world, processing millions of searches per minute, and therefore if one of its top queries is “What is Bitcoin” over the course of 2018, it’s safe to say that crypto reached the mainstream, at least as a topic of interest.
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