Culture

12 Years of Migration-Related Google Searches, Mapped

An interactive data visualization shows where people are searching for information on moving to G7 countries.
Countries where people are most likely to search "migration to the U.S." in 2016. Google

Every day, the people of the world type their queries into Google. These searches—once aggregated, sorted, and analyzed—can offer insights about what people in different corners of the world have on their minds.

In the new data visualization below, the folks at Google focused on search data gathered between 2004 and 2016 that had some combination of the word “migration” plus the name of one of the G7 countries. Then, for each year since 2004, they created a list of 10 countries, ranked in order of likelihood that its residents were Googling the combo above relative to all other searches in that country.