I’m totally stealing this from a post by Julianne at Cosmic Variance.
Through the magic of Google Trends, we now must face the brutal truth. No one cares. Or at least, the fraction of people who care is now half as many as four years ago.
That said, I wondered how some of Terry’s goals fared with the hordes of searching masses over at Google. Here’s “Science” and “Arts”:
As Julianne noted, there appears to be a lull in science interest around Christmas – but the same is true for the arts. Apparently, the holiday season bestows a sense of all-knowing, since humanity’s initial instinct is to go straight to Google with any question (or for that matter, Wikipedia). It is interesting to note that, for some inexplicable reason, science isn’t nearly as interesting in the summer months as in January, whereas the arts pulls through year-round.
What about Climate? Sustainability? Biodiversity?
Once again – Christmas cookies and days at the beach win over science. Interestingly, people don’t seem to care nearly as much about climate during the summer than the winter. However, the top four inquisitive cities are all in Australia (Perth, Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne). I would think, then, that the Aussies are more concerned about climate in their summer months than North Americans of Europeans are.
Lastly, a note on sustainability – Googley interest in said topic has remained fairly even over the past 3 years, except what appears to be a sudden increase of proportion not observed in previous years. Perhaps a sustainable “hockey stick effect” is in due course – more folks are jumping on the green bandwagon.
9 Responses to Google This: Terry* Trends
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Ahh… where the control? Maybe just less people using google or using the web generally over christmas. Or is this data base lined for that nuance?
Yea, totally valid point. From google trend’s about page:
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time
Cool.
Interestingly the search for Jesus peaks 1-2 months after Christmas, presumably when creditors are assembling their trebuchets and other siege weaponry.
I saw that as well, but I thought it coincided with Easter instead. Perhaps “we” place more importance on death, versus life?
Good question. The graphs on google trends for death/life are really messy. We’ll have to search elsewhere for answers.
And that’s my automatonic moment of the day…
[...] Interestingly, every year there is a lull in traffic in mid-April, July, late August and December (or conversely, increased traffic in all other months). The lull in December is likely an artifact, however, given the huge increase in traffic searching for Christmas-related items is probably diluting the signals from terms searched (as well as other terms, like science, arts, sustainability, and biodiversity – see here). [...]
[...] unit (philanthropic unit?) has taken their ever so popular (well, popular on Terry – see here, here, here, and here) Google Trends tool and applied it for good. According to Google (article), [...]