Team
Data analysis Pallavi Singhal
Design Federica Fragapane
Development Paolo Corti
Google Trends Simon Rogers & Alberto Cairo

This project shows the top Google search for “why is/are … so expensive” in any language in each country and year between 2012 and 2023, for which data was available. Sensitive searches have been removed.

The top search result in each country has been translated to English and manually categorized into eight categories, which have then been used for analysis

The actual top search in each year (where available) is shown in English on hover in country-specific sections of the interactive.

Global maps show relative search interest among countries where the selected category was the top “why is … so expensive” search in 2023 (a darker colour indicates that that country’s “why is/are … so expensive” search had a higher search interest, after adjusting for population size, than other “why is/are … so expensive” searches falling within the selected category. No colour indicates that the country’s top “why is/are … so expensive” search did not fall into the selected category in 2023).

The project also looks at overall search interest (not exclusively related to “why is/are … so expensive” searches) in a number of search topics related to cost of living, including cost of living, inflation, expensive, interest rate, loan, wage and credit. Search interest in each of these topics has been indexed over time, with the year when search interest was highest given a value of 100.

Missing values are due to insufficient data being available for that particular location in the given year.