Nicholas Wigginton highlighted Google Trends a couple of weeks ago. You put in a search term and get back a graph showing the peaks and troughs in searches for that phrase over a given time period. For very common terms, you also get a chart of news references for the term. Here are a few examples.
1. Richard Dawkins
After a few years evolving in the wilderness, the Great Atheist of Oxford slams back into prominence towards the end of 2006 with the publication of The God Delusion. Google Trends also gives a geographic breakdown (searches for the given term are normalised by dividing by the total of all searches from the region). For some reason, the normalised Irish were twice as likely as Americans to search for Richard Dawkins. Edinburgh was top city.
2. Cancer cure
There’s nothing very informative in the graph, but top region for this search term is the Philippines (any theories why?), followed by Canada and the USA.
3. Nanotechnology
Interesting to note the prominence of Asia-Pacific in this line-up. And look at Iran.
4. Stem cells
Here’s a good example of how Google Trends can help identify reasons for peaks in search terms. For stem cells, India was again top dog, followed by Singapore and Australia.
That’s just a few examples. Have a play (it is Friday afternoon) and see if you can come up with anything surprising.
Interesting that ‘diet’ peaks after Christmas, then goes into decline until the next year…..
And that ‘depression’ dips in the summer months…..
And ‘science’ has an odd but repeatable trend? Although I guess at Christmas and summer months you do seem to loose enthusiasm.
Ha, nice additions Rebecca.
A predictable pattern for the term love:
And another “summer lull” for the term religion:
Very cool searches. The summer lull is interesting. I wonder if it’s because school’s out?
”global warming”: summer, Christmas and Al Gore effect…
The news stories for religion are interesting. Now one shouldn’t normally conflate causation and correlation, but in this case it’s funny, so it must be true.
See that big drop before (B)? Well the story was
The next Billy Graham? Religion experts say there won’t be one
Ah, thought everybody. It’s safe to return.
The rise leading up to (D) was brought to a massive halt by this story from the Belleville News-Democrat: Religion briefs. Um.
And finally, what is story (F) that started the precipitous decline?
Romney on religion
Poor guy.
Linking this with Bronwen’s finding yourself on Google entry I was a bit disappointed to discover when trying Google Trends on myself that I get the response Your terms – brian clegg – do not have enough search volume to show graphs. Nobody loves me.
Still, if I don’t have enough volume, does that mean I’m slim?
Here’s another goody. Put in creativity and you’ll find it’s been searched for most in Singapore, then India, Malaysia, Philippines and Hong Kong. The big English speaking countries, despite their domination of general usage of Google, only come in 6th to 9th (respectively Australia, UK, US and Canada). Does this mean they’re creative enough (unlikely) or they just don’t care?
Since we’re all about blogging here, check out the word ‘blog’:
it is starting to plateau?