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The current price of bitcoin has a 91% correlation with the volume of Google search requests for bitcoin-related terms, according to a study by SEMrush, a search engine marketing agency.

The study drew from a database of 120 million US keyword searches linked to the cryptocurrency. The overall search volume of bitcoin-related keywords is estimated to be 51.4 million requests over a period of a year. It showed that the price of bitcoin in US dollars rose and fell largely in tandem with the number of search requests for terms like "bitcoin," "bitcoin price," and "bitcoin value."

At one level, the study merely confirms the obvious: As bitcoin becomes more expensive, and thus more exciting, more people search online to find out how it is doing. On the other hand, it is nice to see statistics confirm your hunches. While the study looked at the correlation between searches and prices, it did not — sadly — say whether searches predicted or trailed the bitcoin/dollar exchange rate.

Bitcoin searches have gone up 450% since April 2017, SEMrush says. The data in the sample is about a week old.

Since June 2017, online searches for the price of Ethereum, another digital cryptocurrency, have almost equaled bitcoin searches, SEMrush says. Here is the bitcoin chart:

Bitcoin price search trends

SEMrush

Bitcoin grew from about $1,076 on April 1 to a peak of nearly $4,764 at the beginning of September before falling back to $3,972 at the time of writing.

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Jim is the former editor-in-chief of Insider's news division.Previously he was the founding editor of Business Insider UK.He has also been managing editor at Adweek, an advertising columnist at CBS Interactive, and a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia Business School. His work has appeared in Slate, Salon, The Independent, MTV, The Nation and AOL.His investigative journalism changed the law in the US First Circuit Court of Appeals (U.S. v. Kravetz), the Third Circuit Court of Appeals (North Jersey Media v. Ashcroft), New Jersey (In Re El-Atriss), and New York State (Mosallem v. Berenson).The US Supreme Court cited his work on the death penalty in the concurrence to Baze v. Rees, on the issue of whether lethal injection is cruel or unusual.He won the Neal award for business journalism in 2005 for a series investigating bribes and kickbacks in the advertising business.Here's a selection of his past stories:   • The alleged betrayal in these photos, texts, and emails cost Snapchat $158 million   • Inside the conspiracy that forced Dov Charney out of American Apparel   • The Evolution of Ev: The creator of Twitter, Blogger, and Medium has a plan to fix the mess he made of the internet   • THE "KNOCK-IN SHORT": Nigel Farage and the massive bet against the pound on the night of the Brexit vote   • eBay worked with the FBI to put its top affiliate marketer in prison   • How Dunkin Donuts ended up hiring a psychotic credit card thief as director of communications   • BEJEWELED: The definitive, illustrated history of the most underrated game ever   • The CEO of Publicis told us how he stared down a furious internal rebellion to bet the future of his $11 billion company on artificial intelligence   • FBX: The billion-dollar Facebook business that never happened   • The €150 million check-kiting scam that bankrupted Leo Burnett in Greece   • My Polaroids of the September 11 attacks led me into America's secret court system for terrorist suspects   • YouTube deleted 130 rap videos to help police fight street gangs responsible for thousands of stabbingsDisclosure: I own shares of Twitter (TWTR).