I don't see the evidence behind this piece. In the article linked it says: << For instance, in the month before the Brexit vote, 8,100 Britons googled “what i

I don't see the evidence behind this piece. In the article linked it says: << For instance, in the month before the Brexit vote, 8,100 Britons googled “what is the eu.” That’s around 261 a day. Google Trends showed a huge spike in searches for that term the day after the referendum; assuming searches for the term tripled, that’s still fewer than 1,000 individuals googling “what is the eu” in response to the “Leave” victory. >> The key is "assuming searches tripled". Did they triple or did they increase by a 100? All the evidence we get is a line going from zero to a little peak. But without any scale: https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1000/1*mA4iVZVb41Mf0bif-EUCCA.jpeg https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1000/1*mA4iVZVb41M... It seems to be 1/3 of the number of searches for "Game of Thrones". Did only 3,000 people search for Game of Thrones? I went back to google trends and found this: http://imgur.com/zwrWEqB http://imgur.com/zwrWEqB On June 24th, people in the UK searched "Game of Thrones" 1.3x as frequently as "what is the eu". According to Keyword Planner, "Game of Thrones" was searched in May 2.2M times. Approx: 73,000/day. This _could_ mean that "what is the eu" was searched 56,000 times. I like how people get up in arms about the lack of rigour of the other side but forget to check if this piece is likely to be true. Now, whether it was searched by the "Leave" voters, the "Remain", the foreign residents or the people who didn't show up at the poll, that's anybody's guess). edit: June 24th was a day with few "Game of Thrones" searches. So not likely one with an average number of searches, i.e. 73,000. Maybe 35,000? The main point is that everybody accepted the 1,000 searches.