Tripping

So I decided to have a play around with Google today. They are ever increasing their arsenal of online tools, gizmo’s and gadgets and wanted to see what was new. I came across http://pages.google.com/ and signed myself up, not overly impressed but it’s still early days and sure Google will get it right over time.

Then I re-visited Google Trends [ http://www.google.com/trends ] which has been around for a while, but had some real fun this time.

‘Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.’ Allowing you to compare which term has more related searches. You can also get geo related data. Google tells you which cities are searching for those terms the most, and compares the breakdown of the search terms across those cities.

As Google puts it:

“Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities' ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.”

So you get to compare what is searched for more ‘man vs machine’ ‘football vs soccer’ etc. You also find that it is fairly consistent for most search terms across the planet. Sometimes however anomalies appear, on a local basis. For example in Bratislava, Slovakia the number of ‘sad’ related search terms far outweigh those with the word ‘happy’. In the rest of the world the opposite is true. I found this information too depressing and tried to take a more light-hearted angle, and found myself happy to learn that across the world people search for ‘wife’ more than they do ‘prostitute’ except in Italy, and ‘Tits’ beat ‘Ass’ everywhere except USA and Canada.

What do some of these trends mean, do they seem obvious to you? DO they mean nothing at all and is ‘Google Trends’ a waste of time?

Let me know what you come back with on your search phrases, interesting way to gain an insight into the mood of the planet.

Here are some of the results I got…..

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SAD vs HAPPY
http://www.google.com/trends?q=sad%2C+happy
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Wife beats Prostitute everywhere but Italy!
http://www.google.com/trends?q=wife%2C+prostitute
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Tits beat Ass in every country but USA & Canada
http://www.google.com/trends?q=tits%2C+ass&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all