Google trends boost comes after the price rise, not before.
How do we know for sure?
As ever, what's in it for Google to give the public free information services?
Google could potentially get paid by x entity to artificially inflate or deflate publicly accessible (free) information. It totally wouldn't surprise me and it may even be happening already. They can make it seem like no one is interested in crypto right now, just to accumulate as many coin as possible, to later inflate Google Trends and initiate a bull run to dump their bags on dumb money.There is however a less sensational alternative: Google Trends is a loss leader, to create goodwill and trust in the Google brand. Which would be interesting in it's own right; why would Google need to make such efforts to have people trust them? (nothing about helping to correct a deficit in how trustworthy google are, of course
)Still, I'd be very surprised if there'd never been corruption of Google Trends data for some kind of gain, just as could be expected from buying top positions in Google search results (I bet Google could make a real profit on that kind of shenanigans).
