Google Falsifying Impact?

If you look up how "qanon" is trending, you come across the graph in pic related. Strangely enough, it shows a lapse in interest lately, to the tune of a 23% drop since the weeks of April 8-14, and April 22-28. The first week seems reasonable–Spring vacation. But a 23% drop in two weeks? It seems odd. April 30th was the day Israel bombed the underground missile factory in Syria, as well as the day POTUS verified Israel's intel on Iranian nuclear intel, to name just one instance where one might expect an uptick in queries.

So digging into the data a bit, I saw a disparity: Even though Armenia is listed as the #1 country for searches, its capital Yerevan comes in at #52 in terms of searches by city–about 1/5 of what comes from the leader, Golden Valley, MN (shout-out to you woke Minnesotans!). In fact, almost every major Canadian city outdoes Yerevan as well.

Yerevan contains over 1/3 of Armenia's population–a little over 1 million people. As you can see from pic related, the next closest city has about 150k people–and there are no other Armenian cities listed, so far as I can tell. For contrast, Golden Valley has a grand total of…about 20k people.

Interestingly, there are no results listing Australian or New Zealand cities, either–perhaps they give country-specific information only. But the fact that Yerevan shows up means that Armenia has no such policy.

In fact, a quick search of Armenia shows that they have a musical instrument called a "qunan"…so the suggestion is that the number of Armenian people misspelling searches for this instrument is larger than the interest of the US citizens searching for "qanon" by 20%. This is even crazier when you consider that the "qunan" isn't even their national instrument (it's the duduk).

So one might be tempted to think there's some major national festival going on of qunan players…except, when you look over the past five years, there's no similar spike in searches during this same season. If you look at other instruments associated with countries, you see that the interest holds relatively steady–and apparently New Zealanders have more interest in bagpipes than the UK.

So what gives? Is Google purposely downplaying the significance of Q's reach? Have any of you seen a sudden qunan revival overshadowing mention of Q-related works? Is internet routing throwing off the results?

I have my suspicions…