Hypothesis: That's when something triggered inside of Google and it started tracking the trend (based on a build-up of volume? news? sitting in the queue for

Hypothesis: That's when something triggered inside of Google and it started tracking the trend (based on a build-up of volume? news? sitting in the queue for a while), and the steep initial slope is not real but a relic of the graph going from 0 to whatever their first recorded data point is. shrug