I've been playing around with Google Trends,
a new Google service designed to spot "hot trends." So far I'm cool on the service.
Google Trends is the company's stepped-up attempt to better spot "trends" replacing its earlier Google Zeitgeist service. Google faces competition by companies such as
Ask, Lycos, and Yahoo, which offer similar services.
As the most popular search destination, Google will loom large in the Internet zeitgeist spotting game. Google says its technology can weed out search engine spam and removes inappropriate material allowing it to spot just the "hot trends" of what people are searching for on Google on a single day.
Google makes big strides with its latest offering. But I wonder how useful the service is. To me it's a fun time waster. But there seems to be a few kinks to be worked out.
Google Trends: Likes
I like the Google Hot Trends feature that lets you drill down on a day-by-day basis to spot the hottest Google trends that day. It's pretty nifty that you can also travel back in time to discover what the zeitgeist was. Right now you can only turn the clock back eight days as Google doesn't offer Hot Trend data before May 15, 2007.
Another nifty feature I like is the ability to simply punch in data such as "Barack Obama" and track the search term over time. The Trend History feature charts the "search volume" and "news reference volume."
It's pretty cool that you can also change the timeframe, region, or sub-region (state or province) of search results. For example, according to Google, "Barack Obama" is a more popular search term in Illinois, where the U.S. Senator is from, compared to Vermont the search term is significantly less popular. Google says it uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated.
Weaknesses of Google's Barometer
I'm a bit more perplexed at Google Trends' feature that delivers a daily list of the 100 hottest topics on its search engine. I ask, how much can we divine from what people are searching for today?
The top four "Hot Trends" in the U.S. today are "singer Irene," "fellini film," "monokini designer gernreich," and "goddess of wisdom." Huh?
This makes no sense to me. And drilling down on the search terms inside Google Trends makes one only more confused. For "singer Irene" Google Trend puts together a list of current Blog posts, News articles, and Web results.
The term "singer Irene" is found in one news story from the Turkish Daily News referring to the "Hagia Irene Museum." In a blog posting the "singer Irene" triggered Google Trend to round up a blog posting on the Italian singer Irene Grandi. Other results are all over the map.
I don't see how Google Trends can justify "singer Irene" being the hottest trend on the Internet for May 23. The other three results appear to be just as random and hard to make sense of.
Virtual Horse Races
The only thing I found mildly entertaining was a feature that let me compare up to five terms and gauge the terms' popularity on Google. (Read on for my sometimes surprising results!)
Here, for example, you can type in the names of Democratic and Republican front runners for the 2008 presidential race and find out who is the most popular on Google.
According to my research Barack Obama takes the White House in a landslide victory over Republican nominee Mitt Romney. You heard it here first. Well, that is if the election were held on planet Google and Google tabulated the votes.
According to other virtual horse races:
John Lennon beats Paul McCartney
And, finally, it's Hellman's over Miracle Whip
The mystery search terms are all clues for the May 23rd crossword puzzle by Philip J. Anderson (edited by Wayne Robert Williams). It's published in the Seattle Time and presumably many other daily newspapers.
Due to the fact that vista sucks, I thing that its great that you save some money and also have a great OS (Ubuntu rocks).
http://gomosos.blogspot.com/search?q=vista
I understand the confusion of the four top trends for that day. I wouldn't have gotten it either had I not done the crossward puzzle. The puzzle that day happened to be very difficult and those were four of the harder clues in the puzzle. Obviously, everyone else had the same degree of difficulty and was using Google to find the answer.
Today was the first time I used Google Trends. If it were not for the crossword puzzle I don't think I would have either. But I do have a complaint. What is the answer to 'fortress' (down) ? I don't believe in looking for the answers in the next days paper, so if someone here doesn't post it I'll never know !