Wednesday, May 10, 2006

Google trends

Gmail is great. Google Maps had me from the beginning. Seems like I use Google News every day. Here's a more frivolous example of Google ingenuity: Google Trends. You can graph the number of google searches over time for any search term. You can also enter multiple search terms and compare the trend lines. For example, in lost vs. found "lost" appears to be steadily outpacing a flat-lining "found" since the fall of 2004. I wonder what happened then.

It seems like there would be scale problems when you compare searches of different popularity. For example, in sex vs. chastity, "sex" appears to be blasting the scale so high that you can even see bumps in the "chastity" line. I wish there were a normalized scale that would allow us to compare the trends in each line even though the scales might be grossly disproportionate.

6 comments:

Sally said...

Didn't the show LOST appear on the scene around 2004? Maybe that's the reason Lost is on the rise? ;)

Drew, Amber and Megan said...

well, we know who has the brains in this family

Fulmer Fam said...

Ummm, don't y'all live in the same house and uh, like share the same bed?
Open the lines of communication for the sake of the children, if for nothing else!

Matt said...

I'm on trial this week, so sharing the same bed is about all we've done for the last couple of weeks.

donr said...

I loved googling the word "content" the other night and finding 6.5 billion results. I haven't looked through all of them yet, of course, but as someone who runs marketing for a big content management software company, there's comfort in knowing there's so much content out there...

ERIC WELLS said...

Hey Sally I feel ya...you know me and how I am....try being married to a teacher...geez..I get corrected on everything I do....Ha....Eric