Forever home

In the early days of the pandemic, shortages of everything from cleaning supplies to webcams drove consumers online in search for available supply. The team at Google Search assembled a broad collection of trends that the firm classified into three buckets: Normal, trends that did change; Abnormal, those that spiked; and New Normal, trends that rose and remained high. Search interest in paper products like paper towels and toilet tissue rose more than five-fold from January 2020 to April 2020, but has since waned. As the pandemic wore on and families remained at home, interest in hobbies like baking and gardening spiked, but have also since faded. Interest in pets on the other hand has remained strong. As pet ownership has been growing steadily for years, there was a less noticeable jump in pet adoption search interest than news stories at the time suggested. However, interest in pet health and nutrition did rise and for instance Google search interest for dog food remains roughly 13% higher today than pre-pandemic levels.