I am confused by your stance.

On one hand I do agree that there is a lot of propaganda on all sides, so one should be especially critical about data sources.

On the other hand, I think then that using Google Trends data for this is a pretty excellent source for this data, and a prime example of something that would be difficult to game. It's publicly available, so anyone can verify it. I guess a true conspiracist might think Google is faking the data, but that seems extremely unlikely and bizarre, given that there are whole swaths of terms you could search for to make similar points.

You may reach a different conclusion based on what a 4-5x increase in "Visa" searches means, but if anything this would be an example of data I would have a ton of confidence in.

At the time of my post, I was unable to verify the Google Trends searches (I was using it incorrectly, and have verified it, see other comments). My main point about using the Trends data is that if there are so many more clearly substantive sources (videos, interviews, history), why lean mainly on Google Trends.

Google Trends is actually a much better data source for this kind of thing, precisely because it's so difficult to game. The examples you give (videos, interviews, history) are trivial to use to give a biased view - just show only the videos that back your viewpoint, for example. It's easy to find a hundred videos on YouTube with "proof" the Earth is flat.

The other thing that is great about Google Trends data is that is essentially a window into "things people are actually searching for when they think nobody is looking." Yes, I realize the irony in that every Google click is tracked, but you'll get much more "honest" results looking at Google Trends data vs. plain interviews. For example, the country with the highest volume of "gay porn" searches per capita is Kenya, a country that is pretty vehemently anti-gay. The reasoning behind that is open to interpretation (I suspect many people are just genuinely curious given images of gay relationships in the media are so much less acceptable there), but for a society that basically deems gay sex extremely deviant, there sure are a lot of folks interested in what it looks like.

The Economist is a short-medium form publication. It has excellent reputation. I am wondering about what's causing you to be overly skeptical? Have there been major reputable publications who have misled you (specifically about Russia)?

That closing question is maybe a bit too open-ended? I will happily defend The Economist as one of the highest-integrity journalistic publications in the world, but they've still misled me in the past. Not in any way that I suspect is intentional, but people do honestly get things wrong sometimes. My own mother has misled me numerous times, always with the best of intentions.

I meant as an inquiry, I would love to see major publications spreading false information (such as Economist, NYT, etc.) and we can discuss about it, referring specifically to the claim of western propaganda against Russia. Not more generally.

I mentioned in another comment, and I don't want to spam, but I wasn't able to verify their Google search trends claim, using the source country as Russia, and searching both English and Russian translations of the terms they quoted in the article.

EDIT>> This is wrong! I am able to confirm the Google Trends data now.

Did you double-check the region in which you're searching? By default it shows trends for where Google thinks you are. I had to use Google Translate to get terms to search in Russian, so take my results with a grain of salt, but, even so, I was generally able to get some nice hockey sticks when I told Google to show me what people in Russia are searching for instead of what Russian-speaking people in the USA are searching for.

My first search was the English terms in Russia region. When someone pointed out I should have searched the Russian translation (I assumed Google normalized this), I accidentally switched the region back to US. So both searches had incorrect results. It would have been nice of the economist to include the direct links to the sources they were citing!

Because those things don't really directly support the article's lede the way the google trends results do. They aren't a demonstration that there is a trend; they're ancillary information explaining why that trend might be happening.

Do you expect the Kremlin to tell The Economist "We will indeed declare martial law in X days" and nothing short of that is believable? Or for the media (don't recall which it was) that announced the rumor based on a source to reveal that source's identity?