Abstract
Search engines make information about places available to billions of users, who explore geographic information for a variety of purposes. The aggregated, large-scale search behavioural statistics provided by Google Trends can provide new knowledge about the spatial and temporal variation in interest about places.
Such search data can provide useful knowledge for tourism management, especially in relation to the current crisis of tourist (over)crowding, capturing intense spatial concentrations of interest. Taking the Amsterdam metropolitan area as a case study and Google Trends as a data source, this article studies the spatial and temporal variation in interest about places at multiple scales, from 2007 to 2017. First, we analyze the global interest in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, comparing it with hotel visit data. Second, we compare interest in municipalities, and observe changes within the same municipalities. This interdisciplinary study shows how search data can trace new geographies between the interest origin (what place users search from) and the interest destination (what place users search for), with potential applications to tourism management and cognate disciplines.
Such search data can provide useful knowledge for tourism management, especially in relation to the current crisis of tourist (over)crowding, capturing intense spatial concentrations of interest. Taking the Amsterdam metropolitan area as a case study and Google Trends as a data source, this article studies the spatial and temporal variation in interest about places at multiple scales, from 2007 to 2017. First, we analyze the global interest in the Netherlands and Amsterdam, comparing it with hotel visit data. Second, we compare interest in municipalities, and observe changes within the same municipalities. This interdisciplinary study shows how search data can trace new geographies between the interest origin (what place users search from) and the interest destination (what place users search for), with potential applications to tourism management and cognate disciplines.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Geospatial technologies for local and regional development |
| Subtitle of host publication | The Annual International Conference on Geographic Information Science 2019 |
| Editors | P Kyriakidis, D Hadjimitsis, D Skarlatos, A Mansourian |
| Publisher | Springer |
| Pages | 145-163 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 978-3-030-14745-7 |
| ISBN (Print) | 978-3-030-14744-0 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 16 Apr 2019 |
Publication series
| Name | Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Springer |
| ISSN (Print) | 1863-2246 |
Keywords
- Interest geography
- Place search
- Web science
- Trends
- Tourism
- Amsterdam
- Netherlands