system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are the most popular searched terms on Google on Wikipedia a good measure of public interest, or public curiosity, in a subject?
gpt
An indicator is exactly that: an indication of X. Often times we can't measure X directly because it's unobservable or unfeasible. 

Campbell & Fiske (1959) were the first real champions of triangulation when isolating constructs (Fun fact: that '59 paper is the most cited paper in all of psychology).

Your best bet is to attack this construct in as many different ways as possible. If you're looking for how popular a topic is, how can we measure that?

We can measure # of google searches (or %), wikipedia edits/articles; headlines that include that topic in major news outlets (online vs offline); you can also measure it using dissertation or research papers on the topic. 

Get creative!


The idea here is that all of these measures will converge on the same idea: "how popular is X at a particular moment in time". Each indicator will miss the mark slightly, but will hit the mark in its own unique way. We hope, as researchers, that if we spread out this risk (what Campbell & Fiske called heterogeneity of irrelevancies), the part where all indicators overlap will be the part you're interested in.