For what it’s worth (**), I’ve taken a look at how Google Trends shows the evolution of the term Bitcoin on its search engine:
What we are seeing above (*) is not a direct representation of the number of searches, but rather the popularity of the term searched for a given moment in time and or geographical location (world in this case). There is always a 100 scaled peak on these charts, representing the moment the search term has most popularity in relation to all searches on all topics. The other values on the graph are plotted proportionally over the 100 base scale.
Basically, what we see on the chart is that:
- Peak popularity was reached during December 2017.. January 2018.
- There was also a peak during November 2013 .. January 2014.
- A smaller peak took place around April 2013.
- A rather small peak took place during June 2011.
- Practically nothing at all before.
(*) Chart labels are in my Spanish Local settings -> ene: January.
(**) Looking over a long period of time may have data skewed due to changes in Google search engine algorithms and metadata storage (then again it may not, but I cannot vouch for it with certainty). Also Google Search engine share has evolved over the last decade.
