rule

The average populace let's me down, every time.
- Hey Google, what does "populace" mean?
- "Think of how dumb the average person is. Then realize half of em are dumber than that." -George Washington Carver
  
  "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." -Martin Luther King
- *lets
  
  good ol' Muphry's Law (sort of).

Whenever these hot trends show up, you're only seeing when it hits peak popularity. You need a comparison to see how it is permeating society. Unsurprisingly, it appears very few people are searching for this compared to the general population.
- People knowing what oligarchy is, so few people have to Google it, is worse? Why?
  
  So it is bad if people do google oligarchy and it is worse if they dont?
  This is a binary criterion. If both possibilities are bad, then good or bad is not correlated with this criterion.
- It changes if you switch "what is an oligarchy" to just "oligarchy"
  
  Woah! That makes me feel a little better. I just used "what is an oligarchy" since OP did.
  Edit: It's weird that as both "oligarchy" terms trend downward "hawk tuah" starts trending up.

People waited until January?
- It’s because Biden just said oligarchy in a speech.
- The media, amongst everyone else
  
  the media, and thus everyone else

Its really obnoxious that Google doesn't provide any units at all for the vertical axis
I think someone said they used to
- They provide one on the left (0, 25, 50, 75, 100)
  What those units mean I have no clue, but I'm guessing 100 means 100% and is the highest amount of views, which they then base the rest on (5% of the highest recorded views, etc)
  
  This is exactly how the scaling works, and why it's pretty useless without another search to compare it to
  
  no, it means 100 people searched it.
- That's just an ol' wives tale man, no way

Don't be too Lemmy bubbled, we talk alot about it here for us to know it but I think it's an advanced enough word for people with only a high school education not to know.
I'm more impressed that people in the South tuned into the speech.
- People with a 5th grade reading level*
  
  I wanted to see if you're referring a vocabulary list or just being a snob so I looked it up. If you go by grade, that word generally isn't covered until a student gets a social studies class, usually in high school.
  That's not to mention any adult English learners out there where this wouldn't exactly be a priority word.

Yes this makes me sad. What makes me mad is that Biden and the Democrats waited until he's GTFOing to bring it up politically.

Oklahoma, of fucking course 🤦

Seriously people, stop falling for this statistical misrepresentation/misinformation nonsense. If the interest in a term peaked, does not mean that any significant number of people looked it up. I have compared the term with NBA and Cats to get two generic comparisions:
The percentages in the lower part show how often the term was looked up relatively speaking. So NBA was usually looked for 30-40 times as much and cats was looked for 15-20 times as much.
So compared to all searches, we are talking about maybe something in the range of one in a few hundred thousands to maybe on in a few thousand searches.
- I'm not sure what's being misrepresented, it's obvious that its in comparison to itself and nothing else
  
  It is represented as as relevant event. But if normally 5 people google it on an average day and then 50 people googled it, it is still completely irrelevant.
  By not providing how many people in total have looked up the term, this information is meaningless, but people upvote it because they want to believe that is is a relevant amount of people who looked it up, because it makes them feel right or whatever.
  You also find this in the comments in this thread where people argue whether "oligarchy" is a term that is generally known or requires higher education.
  We also saw some "news articles" based on just looking at how the relative change of a terms searches was, suggesting this is in any way meaningful despite the reasons it is not without further context.
- So basically "peak == relative to the history of that specific term"? That seems obvious to me and not sure how someone could interpret it differently. Nothing I seem implies that number of searches for "oligarchy" is higher than any other searches for other words.

The states that didn’t know, and the states that don’t want to know or don’t care.