Bitcoin on Google Trends.
What people are searching for, worldwide, measured against the recent baseline. The same signal the Fear & Greed Index weights at 10%.
Plain interest in the asset. The index reads its level and its rate of change.
The latest complete day sits below its 30-day mean by 14.2%
A fear-side query. A spike here is scored as fear.
The latest complete day sits below its 30-day mean by 52.0%
A greed-side query. A spike here is scored as greed.
The latest complete day sits above its 30-day mean by 20.4%
Google Trends is an index, not a count: 100 is the busiest day of the window shown and every other day is scaled to it. Worldwide, web search. Latest complete day against the mean of the 30 days before it, per query. This is the signal weighted at 10% in the Crypto Fear & Greed Index
What Google Trends measures
Google Trends does not publish how many people searched for something. It publishes an index: within whatever window you ask for, the busiest day becomes 100 and every other day is scaled to it. A reading of 50 means half the search interest of the window's peak day, not half of anything absolute, and the same day can carry a different number in a 90-day window than in a 12-month one.
The figures above come from that index, for worldwide web search, refreshed once a day. Each query is fetched on its own: Google scales all the terms in one request against the single largest of them, so "bitcoin crash" requested alongside "bitcoin" would flatten into a line that never leaves the floor and shows nothing.
Three queries are tracked. "bitcoin" is plain interest in the asset. "bitcoin crash" is the fear-side query the index itself cites. "buy bitcoin" is its greed-side counterpart: the search people run when they have decided to get in, not when they are wondering what is happening.
How the Fear & Greed Index uses it
Google Trends carries 10% of the Crypto Fear & Greed Index. The index pulls interest data for a set of Bitcoin-related searches and reads two things from it: the change in search volume, and which related queries are rising. Its own example is that plain interest in "bitcoin" says little on its own, while a sudden rise in a query like "bitcoin price manipulation" or "bitcoin crash" is a clear sign of fear.
The comparison shown above is the one that description implies: the latest complete day against the mean of the 30 days before it, per query. Near 1.00 the day is ordinary. Well above it, interest is surging, and what that means depends on the query — a surge in "bitcoin crash" is fear, a surge in "buy bitcoin" is greed, and a surge in "bitcoin" is attention that the price action of the moment gives a direction.
The bands used for the labels are stated on the page: 1.5 times the 30-day mean and above is surging, 1.15 and above elevated, 0.7 and below fading. They are this page's editorial judgement, chosen so that an ordinary day is called ordinary.
Reading the series
The 90-day line is the working view: it is where a spike shows up and where you can see whether the latest day is part of a build-up or a one-off. The 12-month line beneath it is weekly buckets, and it exists to answer a different question — whether the whole of the last three months is high or low against the year, which the 90-day window, scaled to its own peak, cannot say.
Because both lines are drawn on a fixed 0 to 100 scale, a flat line low on the chart is genuinely quiet and a line that fills the box has genuinely swung. Auto-scaling would make a window that never left 20 look as dramatic as one that ran from 5 to 100, so the page does not do it.
Limitations worth knowing
The scale is relative, so a reading cannot be compared across queries or across windows. 60 for "bitcoin" and 60 for "bitcoin crash" are not the same amount of searching; each is 60% of its own query's peak in its own window.
Google samples its search data, and small queries are noisy. "bitcoin crash" on a quiet day is a low number built from a small sample, and it can move several points for no reason at all. The 30-day mean is there so a single noisy day does not become a headline, and the labels only react to a day well outside its own recent range.
The data is worldwide and English-language queries are tracked, which weights the series toward the English-speaking share of the market. The latest day is also usually still being counted when the page updates; the page waits for a complete day before classifying it, so the label can lag a fast-moving spike by a day.
Frequently asked questions
Does Google Trends predict the Bitcoin price?
No. Search interest tends to follow price moves rather than lead them: people search after something has happened. What it does show is how much attention a move is getting and whether that attention is fearful or eager, which is why the index uses it as a sentiment input rather than a forecast.
Why does the number for the same day change from one visit to the next?
Because the index is scaled to the peak of the window. When a new, busier day enters the 90-day window, every earlier day is rescaled down against it; when an old peak drops out, the rest scale up. The shape of the series holds, the numbers on it move.
Why these three queries?
"bitcoin" is plain attention. "bitcoin crash" is the fear-side query the Fear & Greed Index gives as its own example. "buy bitcoin" is the greed-side counterpart, the query of someone who has decided rather than someone who is worried. Together they show not just how much attention there is but which way it leans.
What does a reading of 100 mean?
That the day was the busiest of the window shown for that query. It says nothing about how many searches there were, and a 100 in the 90-day window can be an unremarkable week in the 12-month one.
How does this feed the Fear & Greed Index?
Google Trends is 10% of the composite. The index reads the change in search volume for Bitcoin-related queries and the rise of fear-side related searches. This page shows the underlying series and the latest-day comparison; the index itself is on the Fear & Greed page.