Abstract:

In the UE there are 17 million of students and over 1.1 million of tertiary education teachers. Most of the current and future students, as well as university staff, learn and work online, so their lives are dominated by the Internet. Being online, they enter questions into search engines - questions about future functioning and current possibilities, questions about health, requests for advice. All these entries, if typed in a Google search engine, are reflected in Google Trends.
Google Trends is a Google service that provides information on the number, origin, timing, and main regions of queries to the Google search engine. The system operates on the basis of the IP number from which the inquiry was made. Its advantage is that the information is updated every hour and sometimes, with some types of information, even in real time. Google Trends is most often used to assess media campaigns, current trends in Internet users' interests, but it can be used for deeper scientific research. Work on predicting crises, diseases or market dynamics based on Google Trends data has already been prepared. Based on the data of Google Trends, there is an SEO tool called "Answer the Public". It is able to present various combinations of keywords and questions formulated in the Google search engine for any query ("Answer the Public" also uses data from Google Trends).

Using these two tools, i.e. Google Trends and additionally Answer the Public, we want to show in our article:
1) In which areas of the world are Internet users most interested in universities?
2) What are the issues (problems) associated with the term "university"?
3) Has the pandemic changed queries about universities on the Internet?
4) Is it possible to speak of the cyclical nature of inquiries about universities?

These are the research questions. In our opinion, what is valuable is that they concern the whole world (the Google browser is used almost everywhere, not only in China and Russia).

The purpose of this article is to establish the characteristics of the search term "university" based on Google Trends data, which at the same time will show the overall picture of current university topics.

The research method we will use is the content analysis of searches generated in Google Trends and in Answer the Public. The analysis period covers the years 2016-2021.

The preliminary results of the analysis show that the most interested in the term "university" are Internet users in the countries of South Asia (Pakistan) and Africa (Ghana, Nigeria). Over the last 1.5 years, the frequency of searches for the term "university" has decreased by 50%, so the negative impact of the pandemic is visible here.

Nevertheless, it turns out that the search for the term "university" is characterized by regular fluctuations, which can be called cycles.

In terms related to "university", the most common problems (accompanying expressions) include: returning to classes, starting courses and exams, opening libraries and laboratories, which shows how the pandemic affected Internet searches. However, other questions also arise, such as "Why should universities be free"?

We believe that such an analysis not only answers the research questions, but also reveals a global picture of universities during a pandemic.

Keywords:

Universities, searches, Google Trends.