I don't trust the conclusions I draw. The average person is very bad at coming up with explanations, and the pandemic misinformation has illustrated this.

"If you die with COVID they put you down as having died from COVID, therefore they're trying to inflate the numbers" is an explanation. If you aren't good at coming up with multiple alternatives and selecting the best one, you're likely to select the one that fits, or the one someone already gave you, and not the real one.

but what about Yandex? as far as I recall, they're bigger than google in russia, hence any google data is missing most of the picture

maybe someone else is falsifying google trends ?

I can't even confirm their statements, but I may be using google trends wrong:

>More Russians are asking Google “how to leave Russia” than have done so in 18 years since such data became public.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Here is the Russian translation (I am not Russian speaking, just used a translator) that is much more proof and addresses another comment on your post. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

Why would they be searching in English? Also those numbers are "relative popularity" on a scale of 0-100. I'm seeing what the article claims here, more or less. But it's a little unclear exactly what search terms they were all checking.

>Why would they be searching in English?

Good point, here's the Russian translation of "how to leave Russia", which doesn't appear to be much different than the English version.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge...

EDIT>> This is wrong! My mistake, when I translated, I accidentally switched the source country back to USA.

I'm not sure what some of the spikes in years past were about, but again it's a scale of 'how popular the terms were' from 0-100 not a raw count. You can see it spiking hard recently compared to the average. Without seeing the raw numbers it's hard to tell exactly how significant it is though.

The article gave you the search terms they used. Why would you make up your own? https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%203-m&ge...

The problem with this assumption is you think people “don’t know how to leave” so they must look it up on Google. I’m pretty sure people flee with family and friends together and don’t need instructions on how to get out of Dodge. You can look at news reports of the foot traffic coming from Russia. You can look at social media on the dissent with the war before Putin axed access. This skepticism is good for assessing the feasibility of a solution, it’s not good when peoples lives are on the line and there’s plenty of reporting from the ground. Wake up.

It's an aggregate over (almost) all the search traffic on the internet. That would be an awfully tall order even for the US government to pull off undetected.