Google Trends: Interesting Results

[joo]

Google Trends is a little tool in Google that lets you view statistics for the popularity of a search query over time and in different parts of the world.

Some of the results can be very interesting and informative, and can reveal fascinating things about human nature and society.

Here's an example: http://www.google.com/trends?q=aids. As you can see, the popularity of the search term "AIDS" tends to peak every year around December - at the same time as Christmas. This is due to the yearly charity fundraising that occurs at this time. Notice, however, as well that although searches for AIDS were very high in 2004 they've also decreased quite dramatically - 2005 and 2006 were about even with each other, but last year there was only about two times the normal volume during Christmas. Will there be a peak at all this year? Maybe AIDS is going out of the public conscience because there is no percieved problem any more, or maybe it's simply because of the lack of publicity.

[Piscator]

Or maybe people know about AIDS by now and don't have to google for it anymore.

[CantrFreak]

Hm, the Polish seem to search Cantr quite a bit...

[joo]

I've noticed that recently developed or established countries such as India, Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, and of course Poland are taking up more and more of the search volume on Google. Particularly for technology-related searches, India has an extremely high amount of searches, usually more than double the next highest country. This is possibly because the newly flourishing technology industry in India, and the large amount of people looking for IT jobs there.

[*Wiro]

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

[DylPickle]

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

Hahaha, the commonwealth likes their porn.

[frenchfisher]

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

http://www.google.com/trends?q=PORN%2C+ ... all&sort=0

[joo]

Hahaha, the commonwealth likes their porn.

LOL yeah, I noticed that too. I figured that maybe people in the US use other terms like "Porno" instead, thus their low position in the list.

edit: or maybe they're so well practised in finding porn that they don't need Google and can just type the URL in straight away

[*Wiro]

I never googled god :O Probably because you don't need google to know about it. It's advertised way too much allready. >.>

@ Joo - Wait, you mean you're not able to do that?

[joo]

@ Joo - Wait, you mean you're not able to do that?

lol actually I don't really go on porn, so I wouldn't know. But if you're from the US I suppose that proves my point eh?

[*Wiro]

I'm from the Netherlands, sorry ta dissapoint you.
And someone who talks about raping so much saying he doesn't watch porn doesn't sound very believable.

[joo]

lol exactly, I don't need porn, do I?

[mikki]

[SekoETC]

Google has been a poor tool for finding porn. All you get is loads of pages that redirect to pay sites. Although people might learn to recognize the portals (some tend to insert your search string into obscure sentences while some just list every imaginable porn related term even though it had nothing to do with the actual content).

[joo]

Yeah generally Altavista is better for porn, and always do something to your query like capitalising some of the letters (sometimes it gets converted to lower or sentence case in the masking though), or rearranging them so they don't make sense as a sentence

i.e. "legAl dAughter porn bArely fAther"