Bitcoin Google Trends: Is a Bull Market on the Horizon?

Bitcoin is finally trending up in Google Trends after being stuck at a low for most of 2018. In general the price of Bitcoin has directly correlated with Google trends.

With that said, a small uptick in search interest hardly predicts the coming of a bull market alone. However, as you can see in the chart above, a sustained increase in search interest is always a good sign.

NOTE: It is important to understand the search phrase to some degree, but the correlation really isn’t about that. Any search for Bitcoin is bullish, and any lack of search is bearish. So you might say “oh, but people are searching for ‘sell Bitcoin’ or ‘Bitcoin bubble’.” To that I’ll say 1. no, they aren’t (‘Bitcoin Price’ and ‘Buy Bitcoin’ are the breakout terms), and 2. even if they were searching for bearish terms, history shows any uptick, even in negative terms, actually has a positive correlation with price.

NOTE: I tried to line up the charts above, but the reality is I’m working with 9 year long linear charts from two different sites (and for some reason the 99 BTC price chart used here gives more space on the chart to the current year… anyway, useful chart otherwise). Check out an image of search trends vs price found on CNBC for another look at the correlation or simply see for yourself by comparing 99 Bitcoins BTC price history and Google Trends BTC search trend history.

NOTE: One could argue that search is a lagging indicator, where people Google Bitcoin when the price starts to rise. Or, one could argue it is a redundant indicator, where since both rise and fall at the same time, it has no real use value. That said, I look at analytics all day, and I look at BTC charts all day… and I would say search trends are an extremely useful indicator of sentiment (both in terms of the correlation with uptrends and downtrends). With that said, a slight uptick in search interest is far less meaningful than a sustained move in one direction or the other.