“What is Bitcoin” Amongst Google’s Top Searched Questions

By Rishma Banerjee

It was about this time a year ago, when, Google searches for bitcoins had overtaken searches related to Donald Trump and had ranked in two categories globally- both the in general news searches and “how to buy Bitcoin.”

In Google’s recently published 2018 year-in-review, the question what is “What is Bitcoin?” figured as one of the top ten questions that people were asking Google, at least in the United States of America.

More people were interested in knowing bitcoins than about DACA, the administrative policy which ensures a kind of amnesty against the deportation of minors who were brought to the USA illegally. This policy is, however, is being reviewed under the Trump government.
They also seem to be more interested in the Russian collusion investigation which is currently underway and is yet to be resolved and has been going on for two years into the presidency of Donald Trump.

The downward trend in the graph regarding crypto search has coincided 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. Another factor that may have been responsible is that once people get to know what crypto is, the amount of searches will also naturally fall. Mass media reporting about cryptocurrency also has contributed a great deal.
Google, so long has never played a highly significant role in the popularizing of bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. However, the Google Play store is much more cooperative when it comes to allowing submission, publication and usage of Bitcoin-related apps than iTunes, which has repeatedly generated news about censorship.

Though Google Trend does not provide the total number of searches, Google is one of the top search ending, which handles millions of searches per minute. Thus if “What is Bitcoin” has turned out to be one of the top queries over the course of 2018, then it is safe to assume that Bitcoin is on it way to reaching out to the mainstream, even if as a topic of interest.