The price of Bitcoin has a 91% correlation with Google searches for Bitcoin

The current price of Bitcoin has a 91% correlation with the volume of Google search requests for Bitcoin-related terms, according to a study by SEMrush, a search engine marketing agency.

The study used a database of 120 million US keyword searches linked to the cryptocurrency. It showed that the price of Bitcoin in US dollars rose and fell largely in tandem with the number of search requests for terms like "Bitcoin," "Bitcoin price" and "Bitcoin value."

At one level, the study merely confirms the obvious: As Bitcoin becomes more expensive, and thus more exciting, more people search online to find out how it is doing. On the other hand, it is nice to see statistics confirm your hunches. While the study looked at the correlation between searches and prices, it did not — sadly — say whether searches predicted or trailed the Bitcoin/dollar exchange rate.

Bitcoin searches have gone up 450% since April 2017, SEMrush says. The data in the sample is about a week old.

Since June 2017, online searches for the price of Ethereum, another digital cryptocurrency, have almost equaled Bitcoin searches, SEMrush says. Here is the Bitcoin chart:

Bitcoin price search trends

Bitcoin grew from about $1,076 on April 1, 2017 to a peak of nearly $4,764 at the beginning of September, before falling back to $3,972 at the time of writing.

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