Can Google search trends indicate potential voting patterns, habits, or even election results? The 2023 General elections in Zimbabwe are on the horizon and as usual, there are lots of predictions about who is going to win and why.
Google Trends is a web tool that gives numeric and visual representations of the popularity of a term or topic searched on Google over a specific period and location relative only to the total number of searches. It takes a small sample of the absolute search volume and then normalizes the data on a scale from 0 to 100 where each point is divided by the highest point on the graph. Thus, a downward trend on the graph means that a search term’s relative popularity is decreasing, but it does not mean that the total number of searches for that term is decreasing. See our graphs below.
