I just saw that Google searches for 'bitcoin zero' in the US reached an all-time high in February.

This happened exactly when Bitcoin dropped from October's peak to around $60,000.
It feels like classic panic-search behavior from retail investors wondering if everything is lost.
Interesting detail: similar peaks in 2021 and 2022 coincided with local bottom formations, so theoretically this could be a contrarian buy signal.
But it gets more complicated here.
Worldwide, we already saw the same search term peak in August, and since then, interest levels have dropped significantly.
In Europe and Asia, there are no record highs.
This suggests that American fear is quite localized—probably triggered by specific factors like trading tensions and geopolitical unrest that mainly dominate US media.
Retail investors in other regions apparently respond less acutely to the same price drops.
And here’s the crucial methodological point: Google Trends measures relative interest on a scale from 0 to 100, not absolute search volumes.
That means a score of 100 now, with a much larger Bitcoin user base than in 2022, doesn’t necessarily indicate more people in absolute terms.
The scale shifts as more people follow Bitcoin.
This is similar to how the significance of a debit card changes as more people use digital payments—the context evolves.
So yes, retail fear in the US has clearly increased, but we can’t just assume this is a guaranteed trend reversal, especially if the global trend is cooling at the same time.
It could still be a contrarian signal, just less reliable than it appears on the surface.