But then, there’s another problem with trying to blame the shutdown on your political opponents: How many people actually know it happened? We can turn to Google Trends, a tool from Google that allows users to compare the popularity of search terms on the site. Searches for “government shutdown” began to spike Jan. 19, the day before the shutdown went into effect. In terms of the size of the spike, we introduce two other search terms that spiked over the weekend, each on Sunday afternoon. The shutdown was the top search term of the four in the District.

Source: Washington Post January 22, 2018 19:47 UTC