What Is Society Thinking?
Google Trends is a new beta product from Google that graphs the relative frequency of a search term over time. Since it compares the number of searches for a particular keyword to all the searches (in a representative subset) it is a proxy of what the population overall is searching for. Once out of beta, this could be pretty interesting, after all it tells you what our "society" is thinking of. I played with it for a while today, to see what society is thinking of, really.Some things are obvious, but still pleasant to see. There are a lof searches for 'Halloween' every October and it drops like a rock shortly after. The comparison of 'shorts and sweater' show the cyclical nature of the keywords; society is either searching of one or the other, but not both. It's either winter or summer. We are looking for shorts in June and sweaters in December, so I guess the northern hemishpere is winning :-)
This is all nice and fun, but I wanted to find trends that actually tell us something about where society is going. What big trends could I glean? Of course there are a lot of things that are popular today that show a nice trend upwards, say 'Web 2.0' for example. That doesn't interest me much because it could be a hype. What I kept searching for is a steady decline in search frequency. What are we caring less and less about? This turned out a lot harder to find. Most declines I found are blips in frequency, like 'iraq' , or cyclical like 'summer camp'. The two I found are 'television' and 'newspapers'. Then I asked, what are TV and newspapers replaced by, and so compared 'television vs. Myspace' and 'newspapers vs. blog'. Both results are very entertaining to see, check them out.
I am very curious if others can find more interesting trends and counter-trends. Please let me know.
On an aside, I did use Google to compare my favorite soccer team Galatasaray, to their lesser known, niche rivals in Turkey, and long behold I saw a very satisfying trend indeed. The obvious is confirmed by Google here.
Nice try... Now try searching FENERBAHÇE with the correct spelling... You'll see that the volume's much stronger, and closer to Galatasaray's, which is natural, since you see below that the searches come from Turkey, where Turks use Turkish keyboards. Now add the graph you get to the graph you get with the English spelling for Fenerbahce... :) Rinse. Repeat.
Posted by: Cem Sertoglu | May 28, 2006 at 06:58 AM
I knew it was only a matter of time with you, before you figured it out.
Emre told me yesterday about the misspelling.
But nonetheless, we are the champions...
Posted by: Baris Karadogan | May 28, 2006 at 09:56 AM
BTW, the misspelt version is originated by and large out of Turkey. Since they all have Turkish keyboards, we learn here that their fans can't spell properly :-0
Posted by: Baris Karadogan | May 29, 2006 at 12:44 AM
Now we can finally compare apples and oranges... Apples have a pronounced seasonal uptick in the fall!
http://www.google.com/trends?q=apples%2C+oranges
Posted by: ayse | June 12, 2006 at 01:21 PM
Very nice, Ayse...
Posted by: Baris Karadogan | June 12, 2006 at 01:53 PM
I was going to comment on the spelling, but just saw Cem's comment
talking about this
Posted by: Saber Zohir | June 24, 2006 at 09:29 PM
Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac is interesting. Especially since searching for either Mac or Apple independently both show the same shift against Linux, and presumably should be added.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=windows%2C+linux%2C+mac&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all
This and the previous comments do point to the sensitivity of terminology/spelling. Seems like some way to add contextual sensitivity to the terms is needed to make this really useful.
Posted by: Dan Herman | June 27, 2006 at 10:39 PM