The Data Drop/what we can’t get outby Akash Wadhwani13 June 2026data: Google Trends
What we can’t get out
A Google search isn’t for show. It’s just you, a ruined shirt, and a clock ticking. So “how do I get this out” is about the most honest thing we ever type: a record of the messes we really make, and exactly when we make them.
how to get a stain out
36 stains pulled together so they share one scale · five-year average · worldwide
The stain we Google most isn’t red wine. It’s blood.
We all rehearse the red-wine save: salt, club soda, don’t rub. But the stains we actually Google are blood and coffee. The small, daily mishaps of a body with a hot drink and a paper cut. Red wine comes ninth, behind rust, tea and lipstick. The bars are coloured by the kind of mess. Hover any one to see its score.
Google Trends · queries pulled in shared-scale groups anchored on “coffee stain”, 2021–2026 · stain list from our Stain Index
Mess keeps a calendar.
Stains aren’t random. They show up on schedule: grass and pollen when spring starts, sunscreen and sweat when it gets hot, candle wax in deep winter, red wine when the parties start. Each circle is one stain across a year. January sits at the top, the months run clockwise, and the circle bulges out in the month that stain hits hardest.
the worst week of the year to own a tablecloth
Five years · worldwide · two December stories that go together
red wine stain
a clean spike, every December
how to clean vomit
biggest week in five years: 29 December
December is when we spill the wine and lose the dinner. Red wine searches climb every year for the parties. And the busiest week in five years for “how to clean vomit” isn’t flu season. It’s the week between Christmas and New Year. Call it the party tax. (There’s a smaller, more honest bump in February too, when the real stomach bugs go round.)
cleaning hacks
270 months · worldwide · January 2004 – 2026
Here’s the quiet one. “Cleaning hacks” basically didn’t exist as a search until about 2017. Then it took off and never looked back. Somewhere around Mrs Hinch and the first viral CleanTok videos, cleaning stopped being a chore you hid and became a thing you watched other people do, at 2am, for fun.
red wine stain …
What Google fills in next · related searches · last 12 months
red wine stain …
blood stain …
The autocomplete is a little map of where life lands: the carpet, the clothes, the white shirt you wore on purpose. And it gets specific fast. Does it even stain, will hydrogen peroxide shift it, and the very particular dread of a period stain on a good sheet.
People also ask
Is this real search data?
Yes. Every chart is public Google Trends data, pulled 13 June 2026. The ranking is a five-year average; the season circles are five-year monthly averages; the December lines are five years of weekly data; the CleanTok line is monthly since January 2004. Worldwide. The stains themselves come from our own Stain Index.
How can you rank one stain against another?
Trends only makes queries comparable when you pull them in the same request, on one shared 0–100 scale. So the stains were pulled in overlapping groups that all shared “coffee stain” as an anchor, then rescaled onto a single axis using that anchor. That’s the honest way to say “blood beats red wine”, instead of comparing numbers Google never lined up for you.
Why isn’t super glue (or wax, or marker) on the list?
Because almost nobody searches “super glue stain”. They search “how to remove super glue”. We held every stain to the same “___ stain” wording so the contest was fair, which means a few messes that aren’t usually called stains score near zero. It’s a quirk of phrasing, not proof those messes are rare.
Why not paint? It topped your first cut.
“Paint stain” is contaminated by wood stain and deck stain (the product, not the accident), so it crowds out the real laundry stains. We dropped it for the same reason we left out car-oil and driveway stains: different kind of mess, wrong chart.