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Winnipeg loves pork, and other Google trends |
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Written by asap
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Thursday, 10 August 2006 |
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 Winnipeg loves its pork, Calgary likes beef. Latin Americans are intrigued by Nostradamus. And except in Dublin and Southern California, hookers are far more popular than blow.
These are lessons learned from Google Trends, a graphical peek into our collective online consciousness, which these days intersects more than a smidgen with our offline consciousness.
U.S. Justice Department requests for search data, and AOL’s recent gaffe in releasing search terms from more than 650,000 subscribers, have made retention of search data a key privacy issue of our times.
The not-too-deep peek allowed at Google Trends -- at www.google.com/trends -- allows you to feel voyeuristic without being sleazy. A little like Superman, when he floats above the Earth and can hear everybody at once but can’t quite zoom in. The site is intentionally vague about exact numbers and doesn’t allow pinpointing of specific searchers (as the AOL data did).
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BE A TREND-SPOTTER
Here’s how you can play Internet trend-spotter. Type in a word or phrase and out pops a graph showing how often that’s been searched for since 2004. You can zero in on specific years or months to find, for example, that searches on Google for “Google Trends” spiked May 11, the day after the search giant announced its launch.
Below that is a list of the cities or regions that have most searched for a specific term. We find:
- MySpace is biggest in California and Florida, which include seven of the top 10 cities searching for the social networking site. Google, by the way, just sealed a $900 million deal to become the News Corp. site’s search engine.
- File under random yet fascinating: The top four cities that searched for BASE jumping (parachuting off tall places) are all in Australia — http://tinyurl.com/gpd52 . And the good residents of Salt Lake City have entered many a search for the term “marshmallow” — http://tinyurl.com/m3kyf
- Most searches for Nostradamus, the famous French publisher of prophecies, come out of Latin America -- http://tinyurl.com/mn6wa
- “Fart” is actually the name of a soccer club in Norway, leading to Oslo’s position at the top of the search charts for that word — http://tinyurl.com/matp7
- St. Louis doesn’t have any such good excuse for being No. 2 on that list, or No. 1 on the cities that most often searched for “booger” — http://tinyurl.com/naox4 ... C’mon Missourians, you can do better.
- You can also compare search terms by entering a comma to determine which is tops in the zeitgeist. That’s how we found out about Calgary’s beef obsession and Winnipeg’s thing for pork — http://tinyurl.com/rn88r -- and about the hookers and blow split — http://tinyurl.com/qyhsl (what’s up with that, Dublin?)
- In the battle of man vs. machine, man wins, no contest -- although the difference is most pronounced in Sweden -- http://tinyurl.com/jfwxr . And love beats hate, especially in the Philippines and that city of brotherly love, Philadelphia -- http://tinyurl.com/knzxw .
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asap staff reporter Ryan Pearson’s name doesn’t show up on any Google Trend searches.
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