Have you ever looked through social media and spotted a trending video, but when you try to play it, you receive a message saying that the video is not accessible in your area? That’s true, it stinks. When it comes to Google trends, this is a common reaction. For those who don’t know what it is, imagine a listing for all of the world’s most searched items.
A place that keeps a record of all the trending items in the world. These items could be people, places, events you name it. Google has a great feature called Google trends where people can go and easily find this information, basically, they can find what or who is trending when and where.
Apart from this, internet users can search for what’s trending by region, time and so much more. For example, if you wanted to know the most searched items in Uganda in June, you’d just go there. Similar to Twitter’s trending feature that shows you what topics are trending or most talked about by location.
Now that you have a little context of what Google Trends is about, this should get you thinking why Uganda doesn’t appear on Google trends? In simple terms why isn’t it possible for Ugandans to find the most searched for items in their own country through Google trends?
Well this could be attributed to a number of factors. We’ll start with Google’s own explanation. As stated earlier, the Google trends feature allows you to search for what is trending by region/location, time period and so on. However, not all countries are catered for like Uganda. Ugandans can’t get to know what is trending through the Google feature.
Let’s take a scenario. If you wanted to know how popular the search for a term like “iOS 15” was by region. You simply type iOS 15. In the regional interest section, then go ahead to choose a region on the world map which will be presented to you like the US.
As you can see on the map, Uganda is not among the highlighted regions. This means it is not possible to know how many people are searching for iOS 15 in Uganda.
Google explains that this happens when the number of times a term is searched for ranks very highly in other regions making the rest insignificant.
In Uganda, where accessing data is still a challenge due to the high costs which are expected to get even higher because of the new taxes, it’s not shocking that less traffic would come from there.
Being listed on Google trends depends on how often the terms are searched for in your region. Otherwise no results will load when you try to find out how popular the term is if the traffic generated is very little.
This simply means if few people are searching for the term, Google will not highlight your region.