We pursue the investigation of information needs during the COVID-19 outbreak, expanding on the analysis of Google Trends’ Searches index we initiated for AGCOM on Italy about “Coronavirus”. This is the first of a series of three reports, each addressing the evolution of queries related to one of these topics: “Coronavirus” (current page), “How to”, “At home”. We selected these keywords for their relevance with the COVID-19 crisis, thus we aim at visualising the weekly ranking from their related queries in different countries, to reveal the presence of common and country specific patterns. We remark that by “related queries” we refer to the ensemble of terms looked up in Google’s search engine together with a given keyword, in no particular order. For example, the query “Cases” related to “Coronavirus” derives from input searches such as “Coronavirus cases” or “Cases coronavirus”.
The method employed is the following:
In the current report, we analyse the ranking of queries related to the term “Coronavirus”, by inspecting the rank chart plotting format that was previously introduced for Italy.
The highest ranked interrogations are shared by all countries under analysis, and mainly concern: factual information (“News”, “Coronavirus”, “Symptoms”, “Tips”); major outbreaks (“China”, “Italy”); the impact of coronavirus by measurables (“Deaths”, “Cases”, “Statistics”) and geographical position (“Maps”), particularly local (queried country’s name and cities).
Among the country specific queries we shall highlight the presence of: “Self-certificate” (“Attestation”) and “Bulletin” (“Bilan”) in France; “Data” (“Datos”) in Spain; “Live” in Germany and Austria; “Worldmeter” in Ireland. Moreover, in the comparison between countries we observe that: there are fewer interrogations for “News” in France; in Germany, the term “Deaths” (“Tote”) was lesser queried, while “Maps” (“Karte”) was highly searched; in Ireland, “China” received minor attention; in the UK and the US, “statistics” were not much queried; surprisingly, in the UK and France the capitals “London” and “Paris” were relatively little searched (at the national level) compared to other countries.
Finally, we could not refrain from listing the most peculiar queries (mostly outliers) we found digging through the regional interrogations.