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2006年06月10日

Fashion Google Trends

Heard enough about Google? Didn't think so. My cautious love affair with our presumably benevolent oracle continues. Would you like to know who is searching for what on the Internet? This is the rise and fall, advance and decline, stride and oscillation of Google's search terms. Welcome to Google Trends.

Google Trends, still under development, allows you to plot search volume over time for up to five different search terms. A small plot of news reference volume sits below the main one along with a list of relevant articles. It also graphs search term popularity by City, Region, and Language for each term. The best way to understand it is to try it for yourself.

The first time I discovered the tool, I gave it a test drive by searching for AJAX (as in "Asynchronous Javascript And XML", the new-ish concept for developing interactive web sites). Sure enough, it confirmed my expectations that there would be a strong rising trend. The top searching city was Ajax, Canada. No surprise there. It is not unusual for small Canadian towns to have such a disproportionately large interest in new technology.

It was, however, enlightening to see Amsterdam next on the list. By region, the Netherlands dominated the searching and Dutch was far and ahead the top language. Before I had completely conceded technological defeat, I spotted an Ajax vs. Arsenal score in the news headlines. Apparently there is a Dutch football team named Ajax. Because you are searching for literal strings, not semantic terms, you have to be careful. Apparently there is also a household cleaner named Ajax. Go figure.

So let's try comparing something unambiguous. The idiosyncratic names of online social networking sites leave little room for misrepresentation. The only exception is "Orkut" where a query could, strictly, be for the instigator of the project, Orkut Buyukkokten, rather than for the project itself. This is, however, a distinction I am happy to blur. I apologize to the other Orkuts who I completely ignore. Let us compare orkut, hi5, friendster, facebook, and myspace.

It's pretty clear that MySpace blows away its competitors though, despite the explanations, I don't see why. Even if I could withstand the contrarian aesthetics of the average MySpace page "design" and then stomach the cacaphonic interruption of every Tom, Dick, and Harry's musical taste being imposed upon me at every page load, it defiantly crashes my browser given the slightest opportunity. I find television a far less demanding way to rot my brain. However, I am not, despite appearances, here to bash MySpace, so let's dig a little deeper.

If you look instead at regional information, Brazil is completely dominated by Orkut. If you have used Orkut before, then this will be quite obvious to you. All those messages in your guest book are in Portuguese. Interestingly enough, the top networking site in Portugal appears to be hi5. So much for linguistic parity.

Moving right along, we can make a few other interesting comparisons. Take business and porn. Apparently interest in business is pretty consistent, but interest in porn is on the rise. That is, of course, on the evil Internet. What is obvious but funny to see charted is, by changing the time-frame to a single month, the popularity of these search terms on a weekly basis. I hope you can figure out the spikes and troughs for yourself.

At one point in my explorations, I performed a search for "money". Expecting to see very consistent popularity of the search term, I was surprised to find a sharp dip in early December 2005. I checked the news around those dates and the only thing that seemed to be a plausible alternative for interest was the finalization of the groups for the World Cup. Football is, after all, more important than money.

Finally, I found some evidence to suggest we may not be as globally homogenized as we think. Let's take a look at three big trends on the net of the past few years: Wikipedia, the blog, and once again, MySpace.

They all seem to be rising trends with blogs leading initally, followed by Wikipedia and MySpace. They reach equal popularity in October of last year when MySpace emerges as the leader followed by wikipedia and then blogs. Let's narrow down our search to Japan:

The results are quite different. Is Japan a trendsetter? A laggard? Maybe both. It seems blogs are on the way out but MySpace has only just appeared.

Of course "blog" is just a name. We are likely seeing a decline in the word's usage rather than the concept's usage. When the format was new, people needed a catchy name for it so that the media could describe it and differentiate a "blog" from a regular site. Now that most people manifest their presence online through a social networking site which incorporates, amongst other things, the technology of a blog, the term is redundant. I think in a few years it will seem as quaint as "homepage" or "Information Superhighway".

Google Trends provides plenty of insight, even if much of it is potentially misleading. Most importantly, however, it's fun. So if you get bored of searching for "business", why not take a break and break down the zeitgeist.

All images are copyright google and reflect searches at the time of writing. Check out google's own information for more about Google Trends.

Posted by William at 2006年06月10日 04:27

Comments

Posted by: Leo at 2006年06月17日 08:57

Posted by: Chris at 2006年07月11日 14:30

Posted by: William at 2006年07月24日 12:45