Google Trends: Topic vs. Search Term [ New ]

Berend B

September 2016

Hey everyone,

I am fairly mew with Google Trends and have a relatively difficult/technical question about the results.
So when I am searching for a topic that has various names or multiple meanings, such as PlayStation, I can select the category and Google Trends will filter out all of the irrelevant results and bring back all of the results for that search term. Let's say we want to find the relative interest level of the PlayStation 4, we can decide to select the topic and then Google's algorithm will understand the topic and bring back results for PlayStation 4 as well as PS4 and many other related search terms (as a search term PlayStation 4 will only bring back results for that exact word/phrase). However I have noted something strange in the results and I cannot figure out why this is happening.

Take a look at the screenshot below, I have searched for PlayStation 4 as a topic and searched for PlayStation + PS4 as a Search Term:

PS4 ST v T.png

We can see that Google does a really good job at bringing back accurate interest levels as a topic since the 2 lines are almost identical. But how can it be that PlayStation 4 + PS4 has a higher relative interest level that the topic at certain points in the graph??? In our case, shouldn't the topic always be higher than the search term since Google's algorithm is bringing in all these related results/spelling mistakes/etc...???? At least the relative interest level of PlayStation 4 as a topic should be higher than the search term PlayStation 4 + PS4 since Google's algorithm is counting both those search terms in the topic. I simply cannot understand why this is happening.

I know that I am being very picky and specific (and that Google Trends is doing a good job) but if anybody knows why this is happening and knows how to explain it, please let me know.