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Visualizing Searches Over Time
An anonymous reader writes "Chris Harrison has built a visualization that explores what people are doing online over time. He explains, 'Search engines are the gateway to the internet for most people, and so search queries provide insight into what people are doing and thinking. In order to examine millions of search queries, I built a simple, cyclical, clock-like visualization that displays the top search terms over a 24-hour period.' Interesting to see that the masses online have fairly coherent and consistent search behaviors. He also investigates the notorious AOL dataset."
TFA talks about the time of day that certain terms were searched for but doesn't say what timezone he is assuming the searchers are in. Most people assume you are talking about the USA these days, but even that covers four hours. But what about Europe? Even back in 1997 they must have accounted for a fair chunk of searches.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Well, well. From the graphic, it looks like the main purpose of search is music, games, and porn. Interesting.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...is to find explanations for the jumps in google trend graphs. This one really got me: http://www.google.com/trends?q=death Explain the sudden rise in 2006. Reason: http://www.google.com/trends?q=death%2C+steve+irwi n%2C+sting+ray&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all
Another interesting thing is that searches including 'fuck' increase during weekends:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=fuck&ctab=0&geo=all &date=2006-10
As much as I hate AOL, I hate misleading summaries too. Search queries ARE NOT PRIVATE. AOL leaking it [or just giving it out] shouldn't be viewed as negative. There is no https://www.google.com/ (it redirects to the http version). No security, no privacy.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
I found it interesting that it seems most people type in things like "information about -something- '" into a search engine.
....and if they don't, perhaps they should.
It seems to me to be a somewhat naive way of searching given that many sites don't necessarily spell out that they are giving information about a given subject. It is an oblique reminder of how many people might view the Internet as a formal collection of officially produced, authoritative "Information" instead of the jumble of stuff that it is. Perhaps search engine logic commonly treats the string word "information about" in a special way given people's apparent proclivity to do this.
Regardless, I would drop those words from the data as they don't really help in showing what people are searching for. It's similar to including the word "and"; it conveys little about what people are searching for and more about *how* they are searching.
No sig.
Semi-off-topic, but there do seem to be an awful lot of people who get input fields mixed up. I run a comic book fan site that profiles characters connected to the Flash. The character has been around since 1940, so there are a lot of villains, supporting characters and guest stars to add. I've tried to make finding specific characters as easy as possible for multiple styles of navigation and search.
A bit over a year ago, I added a suggestion box to the home page. One of the odd things I found was that people were seemingly requesting that I add profiles for characters who were already on the site. After a while, I realized that people were seeing the suggestion box and treating it as a search box -- despite the fact that there was a search box in the sidebar on every page.
In response, I made two changes: First, I changed the "Thanks for your suggestion!" page to incorporate any hits from the site search on the terms entered. Eventually, I redesigned the site layout to make the search field more noticeable.