Google Launches Trends

An anonymous reader writes "Google started to offer a new Trends service that allows viewing search term request statistics split up by geographical locations and languages. In short one can use Google trends to figure out what's hot and what's not and perhaps even find cyclic patterns to pick best time to advertise. From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)."

Comments

Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google....

Dumb. Maybe he's correct, that google popularity is declining, but the examples he gives do not back up his hypothesis.

There's less searches for Ultramax, Trance music, Madonna and Britney Spears than two years ago. Thats because those items are less popular than two years ago.

Oh, and doing a quick search for the author of this 'blog' (which is starting to look suspiciously like a pagerank pusher), I see he has an ecommerce site called ultramax music, that features trance).

So - two of his search items are related to what he's selling! An interesting way to get your name, music & company linked from a high profile website.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Cinnimod]

I'm going to have to agree with WMF above, the examples that the journalist provided in that article are not general search terms for target audiences. He also didn't provide statistics. The reader has no way of knowing whether the journalist put in 10 search terms of his choosing and all ten showed a decline, or whether he sat there for days and put in a thousand different search terms (which I highly doubt).

For example, in a search for trends on searches for "porn", the trend is UP. Searches for "video games" have held pretty steady since 2004. I think he may not have been using general search terms. Maybe he just doesn't want to believe his wonderful trance music could possibly be on the decline. ;P

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[roskakori]

There's less searches for Ultramax, Trance music, Madonna and Britney Spears than two years ago. Thats because those items are less popular than two years ago.

There are also less searches for Linux. Amiga has been been increasing recently. Look Mum, I can see a trend! Well, maybe not.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[kabz]

Yikes !!!

Check out the searches for C++, SQL, Perl and get a load of that decline, though the main source of queries for all three is Bangalore. Ouch !! Incidentally Dallas and Houston make an appearance in the lower ranks.

On a happier note, I predict news soon, from Peru, of a resurgence in the fortunes of the Amiga. AmigaOS forever !!!

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am in complete agreement with the parent post. The article link is nothing more than blatant self promotion for some guy's weird taste in music, of which he conveniently sells via his online store. Gee, smells an awful lot like SPAM. if I wanted to read spam, I'd sooner read through my e-mail junk folder than some linkjacked story on Slashdot. ON TOP OF THAT, the supposed topic of the story is three month old news!!! -- c'mon editors, get a clue. Sadly, I can only see these types of 'articles' growing (hear me Digg, Reddit, etc?), and will be one of the biggest negatives of the much-hyped Web 2.0.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[QuantumFTL]

I've been "spamming" slashdot with a link in my sig for a while now... I wonder how much more effective the pagerank spamming in this article would be - does google have some way to filter out sigs from a site?

Also, I emailed the Ultramax guy a while back (I happen to rather like the music and purchased an album of theirs) and he seems to have good intentions with things. I'd prefer this type of spam to Roland P's any day.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[glimmy]

my favorite is google, yahoo, and msn

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[khedron the jester]

Googlebot crawls Slashdot without logging in. Therefore it doesn't see sigs.

I remember the guy here who used to spam religiousfreaks.com links within his message - not in the sig - so that it would get higher Google pagerank. A search for 'religious freaks' shows the results.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[buswolley]

Interesting. In the United States, there are more searches per capita for Wii, than in Japan. The difference is even greater when searching for the PS3.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Stellian]

The IM wars
You can see very nicely how each region has chosen a favorite IM network. Being a Romanian myself, I can testify that Yahoo messenger is used much more than anything else.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[letxa2000]

I don't know. I agree the topics searched for in the example are self-promotion, but I did some Google Trending on some other terms and they, too, were decreasing; some competing terms that'd I'd expect to see opposite trends for (one would go down while another went up) seem to both be going down.

I don't know what it means and I disagree with the article's conclusion, but I would agree that something unexplained is going on; unless the trend lines represent a percentage of total searches? I can imagine that if the total number of searches is going up then it's very possible that some of these terms would go down as a percentage when staying constant or even going up in absolute volume. But if the trend lines represent absolute values then I agree I see some weirdness.

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Eivind]

It's a relative axis. Has to be. They aren't plotting number of searches being for say "PHP", they are plotting *percentage* of all searches that are for "PHP".

I'm betting basically all search-terms have a downward slope -- especially technocrati ones, for the simple reason that the Internet, and Google becomes more and more common among more and more diverse sets of people, so search-terms gets more and more diverse too.

Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

Google launched trends in May, so this is old news and a dupe. Nonetheless, here's an interesting trend.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[JanneM]

Try this search, just to put that into perspective.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason that digg gets more searches than slashdot would be from non-geeks wondering wtf the "digg this" links at the bottom of some blog items are for.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

And to put THAT into perspective, try this tend.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

And to put that INTO perspective - try this search

(This can go on all day!)

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

And to put THAT into perspective, try this trend. (The top regions bars are interesting, too.)

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[JanneM]

Here's a term that dwarfs even sex (how's that for popularity?): It's Ultitrend!

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[LihTox]

Oddly enough, yahoo and sex are on par with each other.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Clazzy]

Even better, put THIS into perspective.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Bruitist]

This one makes me sad...

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[kabz]

Web-pages!! Pah!!

Most people are much more interested in the Soft Fruit Rankings

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[dogmatixpsych]

Or try this one: http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn%2C+youtube%2C+ slashdot%2C+digg&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[kerecsen]

And to put sex into perspective (umm.. I guess perspective is the only get you get on slashdot relating to sex), look at this. Coincidence? I think not!

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

dupes are up

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[RedWizzard]

Nonetheless, here's an interesting trend.

Not as interesting as this one. More people are using Google to search for Google than ever before!

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[uuilly]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=goatse%2C+tubgirl&c tab=0&geo=all&date=all/

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps the most important trend of all.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[carlosGames]

THIS is an interesting one

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[rm69990]

Or this one.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[rm69990]

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details? compare_sites=digg.com&range=6m&size=medium&y=r&ur l=slashdot.org

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Rebelgecko]

I win!.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Kaetemi]

Nah, you can still get a higher result...
Now find something even higher than that :)

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

In another interesting trend. The internet is full of tubes.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Xemu]

Well, this IS supposed to be a site for stuff that matters, so how about THIS ONE

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[VGfort]

This one puts all those into perspective

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[Lord Ender]

This is the only trend that really pertains to this article.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[fmoliveira]

The news at the side shows that vi is more commonly used as a roman number. If you search for emacs and VIM, as in not VI, emacs started more popular but now they are tied. Everyone I know use VIM, but it must be just some local culture, as the linux community is a small world here.

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[George Rypysc 3]

You Lose.

(I didn't realize THE was such a popular operating system.)

Re:Google LAUNCHED Trends

[The Cydonian]

I'm particularly amused by the fact that it is Canada, and not the US, that scores the highest for 'slashdot' and 'digg', and that India is in the top ten (didn't know Slashdot was that big in India!).

I would have explained that away by saying that these were results for google searches for /. and not actual hits themselves (meaning, if you were a slashdot regular, you wouldn't have searched for it on google), but the cities list is stumping me; why are all those tech-oriented folks in MIT/ Harvard etc (ie, in Cambridge, MA) googling so hard for Slashdot, post-2004? I thought everyone out there knew what slashdot was by 2000/01, about the time VA Linux made its millions.

New trends?

[ShecoDu]

I've used google trends before, is this a new version or just a formal release?

Re:New trends?

[TopShelf]

This is a service of Slashdot Dupes, which periodically "reminds" you of news stories that happened days, weeks, or months ago.

Next on Slashdot: "Microsoft announces Windows ME"...

general declining bias?

[dmoen]

From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)."

I ran my own tests, and I think that the "search volume" axis is relative to the total number of searches on each day, rather than an absolute number. Most of my tests didn't show a declining bias, although I saw that in a few cases. I think the "declining bias" you saw might be caused by an increase in the diversity of search terms. Old search terms never go away, but new search terms are constantly being created as new names and catch phrases enter popular culture.

Doug Moen

Re:general declining bias?

[All Your Name Are Be]

Exactly. from the About Google Trends page (the first question, no less):

1. How does Google Trends work?

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. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph -- plotted on a linear scale.

All this means is that people are using a wider range of search terms. (either from new terms entering general culture or perhaps people are just searching for more than they used to.)

Re:general declining bias?

[zerobeat]

Observe the results for the following search...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=blog%2C+html&ctab=0 &geo=all&date=all

Clearly the results follow the trends of popular culture (at least in this computer tech. based example). It is not clear that HTML is searched less often given the results in the url above. All that is shown is that HTML composed a lower proportion of searches requested in mid 2006 than in the beginning of 2004. See http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#1 for an explanation of how the graph is constructed.

I think Doug is right, any apparent decline in searches may simply reflect an increase in diversity of search requests. Any one search term is apparently searched less, that is "appears less" because it has a lower proportion as 1) More searches in general are requested and 2) these searches with time will tend to be more diverse as more users use google.

Ironically, as more people use google, any one search term as displayed by Google Trends will appear to be searched less frequently.

Zerobeat

Re:general declining bias?

[denoir]

Google describes the values as:

"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."

The diversification and especially the decline of technical stuff is a rather obvious consequence of a still exponentially increasing number of Internet users. Average people, to be precise - i.e not computer enthusiasts, engineers and scientists. Hence while in absolute terms a technical keyword is probably also increasing exponentially, in relative terms it is losing ground to the non-technical stuff. Slashdotters and similar creatures are becoming rare as the Internet demographics gets more and more similar to real-world demographics.

Douchebag's blog

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's keep score:

1 link to some douchebag's blog
0 links to Google trends

Re:Douchebag's blog

[tod_miller]

I hear you man.

fucking douchebag. lets get some mints and shove them in his eyes!

man, dane cook kills me.

hyperlinked 'trends service'

[tod_miller]

seems like only 3 years ago I was saying links of /. should be norel.

then maybe submitter would be mor pleasant with his choice of hyperlink text.

Here is a nice link Google Trends

have a nice day.

Oh oh oh. almost forgot, this is about 9 ice ages old. oh ohoh

do a search for

lemon, lime

it is by far the best search you can do on trends! awesome!!

Holy Nation of Pervs, Batman ...

[mstroeck]

... living in the perpetual darkness of Finlands arctic winter for a few months a year sure can make you lonely, but that lonely?

Re:Holy Nation of Pervs, Batman ...

[dabbaking]

Um...Helsinki? Isn't that where Torvalds lives...naughty kernel hacker!

Re:Holy Nation of Pervs, Batman ...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is ten times scrarier than goatse: http://www.google.com/trends?q=4chan BTW im from finland.

/. Groupthink Trends

[Anonymous Coward]

Internet Explorer, Firefox
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Internet+Explorer%2 C+Firefox&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Windows, Linux
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Windows%2C+Linux&ct ab=2&geo=all&date=all .NET, Java
http://www.google.com/trends?q=.NET%2C+Java&ctab=2 &geo=all&date=all

Richard Stallman, Linus Torvalds
http://www.google.com/trends?q=Richard+Stallman%2C +Linus+Torvalds&ctab=2&geo=all&date=all

Re:/. Groupthink Trends

[daniil]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn

Now we can compare!

[toochoos]

Don't click here: http://www.google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2Cdebian

rel=nofollow

[tod_miller]

sorry. I am tired.

An Upward Trend for Google

[telchine]

Hmm, I can see an upward trend here. However the data they have here is very suprising!

Re:An Upward Trend for Google

[TheThiefMaster]

To be honest I found this one suprising. How many people are searching for "google" in google?

Re:An Upward Trend for Google

[roastedMnM]

Google: Do no evil

It seems like they have gotten their philosophy quite wide spread

Firefox, Opera, ie

[trip11]

I tried out "Firefox, Opera, IE" and was hoping google would be cool enough that I would get a comparison of trafic from each of the browsers. No such luck. Come on all of you Google employies. One of you needs a 20% time project I'm sure. Put in a fun set of 'easter eggs' that catch browser traffic comparisons or platform traffic comparisons, or other specific comparisons for an appropriate search. I'm sure there are more interesting trends than just 'how many times did you search for x'.

Re:Firefox, Opera, ie

[Anonymous Coward]

Try "firefox, opera, internet explorer." http://www.google.com/trends?q=firefox%2C+opera%2C +internet+explorer&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Re:Firefox, Opera, ie

[rm69990]

This tool can help out advertisers. Your tool wouldn't be able to. Thus, this is a better use of Google's time.

Food for thought...

[WindowsIsForArseWipe]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=bomb+making&ctab=1& geo=all&date=all

Re:Food for thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, the results clearly show we need to watch those damned Australian terrorists.

Windows vs. Linux

[phatvw]

Aparently folks in Berlin and Montreal like to search about Windows a LOT more than about Linux. But that could mean a window on a house. Whats odd is that if I include the keyword Microsoft, the results change dramatically

Perhaps I'm not using this tool properly...

Re:Windows vs. Linux

[phatvw]

Oh and I'm moving to Elmhurst Whether there is actually a lot of sex there, or the majority of guys are losers looking it up on the Internet, that means better odds for me :)

Re:Windows vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft windows is filed under "Broken Windows"

CowboyNeal's been hoaxed by a marketer

[E-Sabbath]

Indeed, this isn't a new feature, and it certainly looks like someone has an agenda here. Where are people going, if not to google? And the expected trend of any specific query is to decrease over time as popularity wanes.

Snowboarding vs hiking

[phatvw]

Wow this does work. You can see the cyclical patterns emerge quite clearly, well for obvious stuff at least.

Snowboarding vs hiking: http://www.google.com/trends?q=snowboarding%2C+hik ing&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all

Heating vs air conditioning: http://www.google.com/trends?q=air+conditioning%2C +heating&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all

Re:Snowboarding vs hiking

[shawb]

Exactly. Looking at holiday related terms is very telling Wow... that last one is odd. There's a very telling lack of a peak there... Since july 4th was almost 2 months ago, one would assume that there should be a peak. Either people did not celebrate Independance Day in the US this year, they celebrated in a different way, or google trend's data is at least two months out of date, and therefore useless for trendspotting.

Re:Snowboarding vs hiking

[fireduck]

Of course it isn't updated with data from yesterday. A cursory glance at the scale of the graph shows that the minor tick marks represent quarters, and there's only 1 tick mark in 2006 showing. Thus, we've got reliable 2006 data through a bit after the first quarter (likely through May and maybe into June). You can clearly see that it's starting to rise at the end, and if we had the data, we'd certainly see the July peak.

And just because it doesn't have the latest data, doesn't invalidate it's use for trendspotting. It merely won't tell you what the latest fad is.

Re:Snowboarding vs hiking

[Anonymous Coward]

One expects there will be a peak... when that data is included in the trend line, observe:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=fireworks&ctab=0&ge o=US&date=2006

It's no secret timely the data is. Anyway, from the graph we can see that searches for fireworks in June were trending up. Holy shit, I just spotted a trend! I guess it therefore is useful for trendspotting.

Re:Snowboarding vs hiking

[shawb]

So, the data is 2 months out of date. Therefore of very limited utility in predicting actual trends in "internet-time." Granted, it could still be useful for cyclical trends: seasonal, holiday based, back to school/etc in determining periodic demand, but not as useful as "Wow, this thing is about to get really big, and we'd better jump on it NOW." Then again, maybe that's actually a good thing for society... the act of "coolhunting" (I personally hate the word, but that's what I've read it as... trendspotting is a much better term) has really driven the fad cycle faster and faster to the point where a fad used to last a year or a couple years, now they last on the order of months. This cycle contributes greatly to the disposable culture that we are sinking deeper and deeper into with all the negative consequences. Then again, maybe fad cycles will accelerate to the point where large factories can't be tooled up in time to supply the demand, and people will start learning to DIY or be square.

Ugg... I can't believe I just posted that on slashdot. Or rather, am about to post it...

Chicago dominates buttsex

[Erectile Dysfunction]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=buttsex

One Solid Trend

[xoip]

There is no escaping this one...http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=0&g eo=all&date=all

Re:One Solid Trend

[Necroman]

You can see Sony's decline through 2005 when it started being out-searched by porn.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn%2C+sony&ctab=0 &geo=all&date=all

Re:One Solid Trend

[idonthack]

Interesting.

Top ten cities searching for porn:

1. Milton Keynes, United Kingdom
2. Birmingham, United Kingdom
3. Auckland, New Zealand
4. Brisbane, Australia
5. Manchester, United Kingdom
6. Sydney, Australia
7. Melbourne, Australia
8. Irvine, CA, USA
9. Brentford, United Kingdom
10. Miami, FL, USA

Top ten regions:

1. South Africa
2. New Zealand
3. Australia
4. United Kingdom
5. Canada
6. United States
7. India
8. Finland
9. Turkey
10. Denmark

Of course these will be a little skewed due to language differences. But interesting nonetheless.

Re:One Solid Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm gutted; Birmingham has lost its place as the world leader. I'd better get searching.

Re:One Solid Trend

[AnFraX]

Even more surprising is this trend. It seems the UK tops out as the most perverted English-Speaking nation, aswell.

Re:One Solid Trend

[kfg]

#1 American city in porn, St. Louis, located in the "Show Me" state.

KFG

Re:One Solid Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

Or for a slightly different perspective: http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex

This is very revealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Goatse rankings

Re:This is very revealing

[Anonymous Coward]

Its more fun to compare

Programming is popular in India

[Erectile Dysfunction]

Some
common
industry languages are quite popular.

Except for interest in Rails.

Re:Programming is popular in India

[Pulse_Instance]

Here you go, this is much more intresting and easier to compare.

Re:Programming is popular in India

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of those are coming from India... Damn outsourcing.

The Microsoft Monopoly

[DittoBox]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=rms%2C+esr%2C+bill+ gates&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Seasonality

[sveinb]

ice cream, snowboarding

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ice+cream%2C+snowbo arding&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Re:Seasonality

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting to see the seasonality of things. Compare the trend for two holiday searches (Halloween, Santa Claus) and one somewhat random (hurricane). If it wasn't obvious, you can see that trends matches what common sense would tell you about what is on people's minds. I'd like to see the numbers in absolute terms (e.g. on a scale that shows the absolute numbers of searches).

http://www.google.com/trends?q=halloween%2Churrica ne%2C+santa+claus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

I also noted that it says it is based on only a portion of the searches, which no doubt are reasonable representative.

Searching on whatever-the-term dot com shows spikes, but as many...showing people don't make that mistake all that often:
http://www.halloween.com/
http://www.hurricane.com/
http://www.santaclaus.com/

I also found it interesting to see the difference between one word and two word searches - I did "phonebook" compared to "phone book":
http://www.google.com/trends?q=phonebook%2C+phone+ book&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

http://www.phonebook.com/

Google confirms it

[Erectile Dysfunction]

BSD is dying.

Old news

[nascarguy27]

According to this Press Release, Google released Trends on May 10, 2006 along with Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook. It appears that the guy who wrote the article just happened to come across Google Trends, put his own website words into it, and IMO he doesn't understand how it works.

Another Scary Trend

[Derosian]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Japan%2C+Europe%2C+ United+States%2C+China%2C+Canada&ctab=1&geo=all&da te=all Whoever knew Canada was so popular?

Someone call Maslow

[eko33]

Modern culture's hierarchy has changed!

New Maslow

/idle speculation

Re:Someone call Maslow

[Anonymous Coward]

But holy crap -- look at it by region!

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Money,+Sex,+Food,+H ome,+Love&date=all&geo=all&ctab=1&sa=N

Only in America is home searched more than sex!

Top searches

[Anonymous Coward]

After comparing the top searches in Google Trends with AOL's leaked searches I think Google have doctored the top searches a little bit. There's likely to be "www.google.com", "google" or a "www.myspace" in the real results.

Does not compute

[RLiegh]

From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)

It would have to mean that less people are searching, because what else would these mysterious people be using to search with if not google? The browserbar that some spammer hijacked onto their copy of IE? Google is search; so it's reasonable to assume that if less people are using it, it means that less people are searching.

Re:Does not compute

[traveller.ct]

Or people were using something other than Google to search. Perhaps Yahoo or MSN?

It did mention "declining popularity of Google" as a possibility.

Re:Does not compute

[Anonymous Coward]

Or that less people are searching for the terms he used. Trance music just isn't popular anymore. The author just refuses to admit that it was a passing fad, and so extrapolates that EVERYTHING is being searched for less because his pet interest is being searched for less. Max is totally missing the point of Google Trends. Check out the name of the support contact on the bottom of this page and all should be clear.

BlogScope

[lailla123]

There exist many better trendspotting tools, e.g. try BlogScope. For example, compare YouTube and Google Video.

Google Trends comfirms it

[3dWarlord]

NetBSD is dying.

Re:Google Trends comfirms it

[Erectile Dysfunction]

You might think that NetBSD and FreeBSD are dying but then you see this and decide they died alone long ago. Then you look at what is really important to people and realize they never cared about any of it to begin with.

Brands such as

[Erectile Dysfunction]

BMW and Mercedes do not fluctuate wildly, while Britney Spears has seen a mostly steady decline in popularity despite an increase in "scandals."

how did i guess

[dabbaking]

Google is so predictable. On a hunch, I typed in trends.google.com...and what do you know. They should come up with more creative titles for their subdomains.

Someone please help me

[rbarreira]

Someone please help me analyze this one.

Re:Someone please help me

[daniil]

You might also want to take a look at this.

Well, at least look on the bright side...

[Xenographic]

Try this search to see that Slashdot still maintains its high quality standards :-)

Slashdot vs. Digg

[code65536]

Ouch. :( http://www.google.com/trends?q=slashdot%2C+digg&ct ab=0&geo=all&date=all

*likes /. much more than Digg*

An even Scarier Trend

[Harmonious Botch]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=france%2C+england%2 C+germany%2C+Canada&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all
It's truly scary when you realize why the parent trend looks that way.

Re:An even Scarier Trend

[Harmonious Botch]

But it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. So many alleged trends are actually propped up by something else.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=france%2C+paris%2C+ %22paris+hilton%22%2C+%22tour+de+france%22&ctab=1& geo=all&date=all

Re:An even Scarier Trend

[Anonymous Coward]

It is interesting to see spikes. For example, tying into your Paris Hilton example, a simple term like "phone book" has spikes that are explained by things like "Paris Hilton's phone book is online."

http://www.google.com/trends?q=phonebook%2C+phone+ book

http://www.phonebook.com/

Re:An even Scarier Trend

[tmuka]

you can do this http://www.google.com/trends?q=france+-tour%2C+par is+-hilton%2C+%22paris+hilton%22%2C+%22tour+de+fra nce%22&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

Singular v. plural

[scooter.higher]

Now this is interesting:

Man v. Woman
http://www.google.com/trends?q=man%2C+woman&ctab=0 &geo=all&date=all

Men v. Women
http://www.google.com/trends?q=men%2C+women&ctab=0 &geo=all&date=all

Re:Singular v. plural

[coflow]

This is a complete surprise to me.....

Re:Singular v. plural

[shawb]

Clicky. This has to be the most interactive article I've seen. It's turned into a game in several threads.

Re:Singular v. plural

[Anonymous Coward]

I note that the #1 city for the search for "man" is Stockholm, Sweden. I also note that in Swedish, "man" means "husband".

Popularity is not popularity

[kirun]

Take, for example, DS vs PSP. Any look at sales charts will tell you that the DS is ahead, but PSP is ahead in searches. Unless there's a whole load of Paint Shop Pro fans skewing the results.

Re:Popularity is not popularity

[eipipuz]

You may look at the News chart, just below the search one...

Re:Popularity is not popularity

[rshane]

Perhaps. Maybe you just have to be more specific.

Re:Popularity is not popularity

[Anonymous Coward]

PSP is probably ahead in searches due to the ability to hack the PSP early on, and all the homebrew items that came out for the PSP. In my little world I have heard of no homebrew items for the DS. I also do not own either one of them. So maybe it is better marketing of the PSP hack people.

My research

[DrKyle]

My hypothesis has finally been proven! While geeks remain unpopular, pizza and lesbians are steadily gaining in popularity.

HAHA A pagerank scam !

[Anonymous Coward]

The guy uses search terms related to what he's selling , and slashdot fell for it !! HAHA!

Slashdot Moderators need to be replaced

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are slacking these days. Follow BillG and make space for youngsters.

Old news, technically

[raalynthslair]

While this is technically old news - the "beta" has been available to play with for some time now. I remember looking at it to prove a point about "porn searches" to my friend - that US was NOT #1 on the categories WE could think of (only about 4 so I KNOW we missed some)... and being surprised that we were further down than 10th... Arab nations almost empirically held the top places... But the point is, that this has been around now. But, it IS news that something Google has put out IS listed as 'complete' and not just "Beta" for once. That is a rare thing. It seems that all of Google stuff is "beta" forever. :o)

No units, what's the point

[Paul Carver]

How can any x-y graph without units on the y axis be useful? Without units this entire thing is just mental masturbation. You can play around with it if that sort of thing makes you happy, but I can't see any actual value coming out of it because without numbers it's just meaningless pictures.

Re:No units, what's the point

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=paul+carver&ctab=0& geo=all&date=all

Re:No units, what's the point

[Mad Marlin]

You don't need units to do this one: Star Trek vs. Star Wars. Yay for mental masturbation! (mental vs. masturbation)

Re:No units, what's the point

[delinear]

I would guess the reason they don't include the figures is that, as stated, the trends database is currently running off a subset of the main database. Therefore, even if they did throw in the figures, they'd likely still be misleading in relation to search as a whole. By not including any y-axis figures they mitigate this a little - people can't get carried away by numbers if there aren't any, but at the same time it's enough to identify broad trends.

Telling stories with lies, damned lies and trends

[new500]

Hmm, okay, so can i prove something with this?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=sex%2C+politicians% 2C+internet%2C+internets%2C+email&ctab=1&geo=all&d ate=all

i.e, everyone wants to know where sex can be found, a heck of a lot of people want to know where their email is, a elite minority are looking for that internet that was sent them but never arrived, "internets" clearly remain off the practical radar for now, and no-one cares at all where their politicians are?

I'm beginning to think this is a marketing / pr / scaremonger's wet dream

s/nouns/adjectives and Scary Trend dissappears

[Harmonious Botch]

If you swap adjectives for nouns ( use 'canadian' and 'japanese' etc, instead of 'canada' and 'japan' etc ) then the trend is not there. There is not a trace of it. I think that the trend for the word 'Canada' is a bizarre artifact. If we knew why it was there then we might know a lot more about how google trends relly works - or fails.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Japanese%2C+Europea n%2C+American%2C+Chinese%2C+Canadian&ctab=1&geo=al l&date=all

Evil

[miracle]

"google evil" vs. "satan evil" very interesting!

http://www.google.com/trends?q=google+evil%2C+sata n+evil&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Re:Evil

[Danimoth]

Any ideas what that spike is?

try this one!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Slashdot%2C+Digg%2C +youtube%2C+myspace&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

Look at results for Women, Woman

[PWNT]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=woman&ctab=1&geo=al l&date=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=women&ctab=1&geo=al l&date=all

Pretty crazy that Iran and india are the top searchers for those words.

I'm baffled, if they want porn, they should be searching that.

The google results for women/woman yield wikipedia and a bunch of informative sites about womens's health!

Very interesting, also looking at cross country skiing shows Canada has large interest in the sport, and ottawa is the capital of it!

Canada also wins the beer category!

Vietnam searches for sex the most? Notice how "backwards" or theological countries have more of these searches??? Crazy

Re:Look at results for Women, Woman

[Anonymous Coward]

There are one billion people in India. A good percentage of them have internet access. If the "trends" is showing graphs based exclsively on search frequency, the results would be pretty skewed.

Think 100 out of x google users in the US, who happen to be woman looking for feminine type stuff to read,
Vs
1000 out of x * 10 google users in India doing the same.

Top searches for 'Google Trends'

[groovelator]

Apparently Turkey, New Zealand and Denmark have the highest number of searches for 'Google Trends'.

So what's that all about?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22google+trends%22 &ctab=1&geo=all&date=all/

Re:Top searches for 'Google Trends'

[groovelator]

Oops. That link didn't work...

Hope this one does :> http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22google+trends%22 &ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

Happy Holidays

[Anonymous Coward]

and a happy new year

The obvious ...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=apples%2C+oranges&c tab=0&geo=all&date=all

Google Trends use of geolocation

[wired_parrot]

Isn't Google Trends geolocation inherently innacurate? As I understand, it is using your IP address to determine your location, but this only gives you the location of your ISP router, and the two can be different by hundreds of miles. Since ISP routers tend to be located in urban areas, they tend to get a disproportionate amount of traffic. There was an interesting article about the problems with Google Trends, pointing out how for example the suburbs of Milton Keynes in England are constantly highly ranked in Google Trends, because BT has a large routing center in the area.

The trends are interesting, but I'd be careful about how they are used.

war and oil

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.google.com/trends?q=war+oil&date=all&ge o=all&ctab=2&sa=N

Reflection

[CMan0]

I think that volume search doesn't necessarily represent traffic volume or popularity. In the end, slashdot has it's crowd, which has established long ago with a very high volume, and digg is much newer. Also, means that /. ppl can remember the URL more easily.

Re:Reflection

[rm69990]

As I posted above, according to Alexa, Digg has surpassed Slashdot in the number of unique visitors per day. I would like to know why....Digg is a steaming pile of S***. Bunch of 13 year olds come and ruin it.

Re:Reflection

[LordSnooty]

There are more 13-year-olds than geeks?

Re:Reflection

[rm69990]

At Digg there are. I'm not sure which they have done more damage to, the comments section or the articles themselves. Some of the articles are just downright dumb, the titles often have more punctuation than letters, the comments consist of "Dupe!!!!", "LOL!!!!" and "OMG!!!!" more than anything insightful, etc etc. I finally gave up on the site after a week yet I've been reading Slashdot for 2 years now. I think Digg and Myspace should merge into a single website, and then MyDigg should just be deleted from the internet personally :-P

As for the traffic thing, it could be because Digg has more stories in a day, and thus gets more page hits than Slashdot. Looking at my Bloglines account, Digg has 6367 subscribers that use Bloglines to monitor RSS feeds, vs. 79,354 for Slashdot.

Thank goodness

[junglee_iitk]

I like this comparison.

Re:Thank goodness

[Shadyman]

I think even more interesting is this comparison. http://www.google.com/trends?q=love%2C+hate%2C+sex &ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

A new one

[Anonymous Coward]

google trends comfirms it. BSD is dead

Re:A new one

[Anonymous Coward]

shit wrong link

the correct one

A simple explanation

[beefstu01]

Well, this is because women travel in packs, thus the singular "woman" doesn't really exist...

Fixed Summary

[mattwarden]

In short one can use Google trends to figure out what's hot and what's not amongst those Internet users that search on Google and perhaps even find cyclic patterns to pick best time to advertise on Google.

Maybe that sounds picky, but you have to consider the sample before you start making conclusions and generalizations.

Nigel:It really puts perspective on things,though

[xPsi]

David: Too much, there's too much fucking perspective now.

Hmm

[sejinh]

Those New Zealanders are horny bastards... http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=1&sa=N

Re:Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, you should see New Zealand women, then you'll see why we need porn!

here's another couple of interesting comparisons

[oohshiny]

http://google.com/trends?q=ubuntu%2Cmacintosh http://google.com/trends?q=mac%2Clinux http://google.com/trends?q=osx%2Cubuntu (note that you get the top cities/regions for the first term)

Humanity

[Anonymous Coward]

This one *so* captures humanity

Jobs

[od05]

Look at the top cities, they are all in India! This is where all of our jobs are going.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=jobs&ctab=0&geo=all &date=all

Interesting Search: John Kerry

[skozmedia]

Do a search for "kerry", and you will discover and interesting pattern up to election day and afterwards? Well, let's just say that I can't find a better analogy for flat-lining.

this news is old news

[varunvnair]

Isn't this very very old news? I think Google Trends was launched at least a couple of months back and possibly before that.

Hemisphere

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know if there's a way to get these on the same graph, and aussie doesn't have as much search data... but...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=skiing%2C+snowboard ing&ctab=0&geo=AU&date=all

http://www.google.com/trends?q=skiing%2C+snowboard ing&ctab=0&geo=US&date=all

You can see the differences in winter vs summer

Wheat from the chaff?

[scottblascocomposer]

They seem pretty separate to me already!

wheat + chaff :)

Snakes on a Plane

[Anonymous Coward]

what about this:

http://google.com/trends?q=snakes%2C+plane%2C+snak es+on+a+plane

snakes on the motherf*** plane!!!

Penny Arcade & Strawberry

[cnoocy]

I like that you can see Penny Arcade's Strawberry Shortcake strip make a big enough splash to notably affect searches on "strawberry":
http://www.google.com/trends?q=penny+arcade%2C+str awberry&ctab=1&geo=all&date=2004

DO WHAT YOU SAY, SAY WHAT YOU MEAN

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Wussy Gary,

You post nothing but trolls on this site and then whine like a little bi-atch that you can't get into a valid discussion. I thought you said you were going back to Digg? Oh, you must have forgotten that you stopped visiting them because they're total fuckers.

We're all left questioning your ability to be involved in an intelligent conversation.

Some more comparisons..

[StikyPad]

Pepsi beats Coke

California beats Florida (and Hawaii)

Right beats left

MIT > all

And apparently, the number of people who say tomato almost exactly matches the number who say tomato, although it varies slightly by city as seen in the chart at the bottom. http://www.google.com/trends?q=tomato%2C+tomato&ct ab=0&geo=all&date=all