I believe that google searches can potentially be a proxy for interest in bitcoin. That being said, I think it is too small to make meaningful differences (when I say meaningful, I mean, how can we, as bitcoin investors/traders/whatever actually make buying and selling decisions based on this information). Here's an idea to supplement your research to create a more powerful proxy: check out search terms such as "buy bitcoin" in google trends to see how that changes over time. I imagine people who search things like that are ordinary folks trying to get some bitcoin. I don't actually think we've quite gotten to the point yet where people who've never even heard of coinbase are trying to buy bitcoin (less than 1% of 1% of internet users use bitcoin).