UK Edition
Were Britons really Googling 'What is the EU?' after voting to leave?
In the hours after the UK voted to leave the European Union reports that Britons were rapidly Googling "What is the EU?" sparked outrage across the internet.
The news of the spike in searches fuelled fears claims the electorate had rashly decided to terminate its membership of the Union. But it appears that the number of people actually searching "What is the EU?" was minimal.
"It’s giving plenty of people cover to insult the entire country, when it’s likely just a few people searching for something in a way that they always search for something," said Medium user Danny Page.
Google Trends data isn't actually representative of the number of total searches for a term, but a proportion of all searches at a given time. The company highlights spikes in searches based on what else is being Googled at a given moment in a geographical area.
So in the early hours of Friday morning searches for "What is the EU" briefly spiked compared to what else was being asked. To put it in context, the search only outstripped that for "weather forecast" between 01:30 and 04:30 in the morning, but by 05:00 that had changed.
Data from AdWords, which offers more specific numbers for search terms, shows that the 250 per cent increase in searches actually correlated to about 1,000 people asking the question.
In the month before the referendum "What is the EU" was searched an average of 261 times a day in Britain, according to Google AdWords. That means if searches increased by 250 per cent, as Google announced on Friday, there were still fewer than 1,000 or so people typing the question into the search engine.
Although the Google Trends data may have included other variations of the term, such as "What is the European Union?", it is likely that it was still a tiny proportion of the country.
Other search terms that appeared to have a boost after the EU Referendum results included "Getting an Irish passport", "How to emigrate" and "Buy gold".