Google Insights: 2010

Now there's a classic j-curve for the new year. Obviously, the amount that people have been Googling 2010 has drastically increased recently as we've, well, approached 2010. The pretty graph you get if you factor in other years besides looks like this:



2010 ain't seen nothing yet, searchwise. On this chart, I love how each year shows a little bit more searches and how each year has peaks and valleys unique to it. Like fingerprints.

Back to the year in question, some random stats:

• The country googling 2010 with the greatest frequency: Eritrea.
• The rest of the top five: Togo, Ethiopia, Cameroon, South Africa, all in Africa.
• American state googling it most (per capita): Virginia (by a long shot).
• Canadian subnational entity: Northwest Territories.
• German land: Hessen (by a long shot).
• In China: Beijing.
• Most searched 2010-related phrase: "pes 2010" (whatever that means).
• Primary search categories in which '2010' features: Sports, Society, Automotive, Entertainment, Local and Computers and Electronics.
  

Google Insights: Santa Claus

The man of many names, the man in the Coca-Cola red suit... he who brings gifts down the chimney; that's right, it's the effeminately-named Santa Claus! Or, before the distortion, St. Nicholas. Or Father Christmas. Or Kris Kringle. Or...

There are definitely historical reasons why the big guy parades around with so many different names. At 12 to 1 to 1 to 0 respectively, on the worldwide count "Santa Claus" definitely wins as most-searched, as this chart shows:



No surprises that people search for Santa more in December than, say, April, right?

Anyway, let's see what that domination looks like from country to country. As global internet-leader, it's no surprise that the American search trends resemble the global ones, at 13 to 2 to 0 to 0. Note that "Father Christmas" and "Kris Kringle" are all but unknown in the States.

What about across the pond in the UK? Well, definitely a different story there. Santa Claus still leads the pack, but it's 11 to 1 to 10 to 0, so Father Christmas is an alias almost as popular.

Australia? At 14 to 0 to 2 to 3, Santa wins but Kris Kringle gets an unexpected second-place ranking. Neighbour New Zealand does not share Kringlophilia, though: 11 to 0 to 2 to 0.

Canada takes Santaphilia to new heights, at 16 to 1 to 0 to 0, although being bilingual, if we add 'Pere Noel' to the list, it gets a count of 7 (by the way, I'm tossing these numbers around, but I'm not quite sure what, if anything, they represent).

Other English-speaking countries? Ireland: 10 to 0 to 1 to 0. Jamaica: 4 to 0 to 0 to 0. Nigeria: 5 to 0 to 0 to 0. South Africa: 9 to 0 to 11 to 0 (the first time Santa Claus doesn't top the list. I tried adding an Afrikaner term, but "Kersvader", "Kerstman" and "Sinterklaas" didn't get me far).

Google Insights: the Simpsons

The TV family "The Simpsons" has five members, in order of age Homer, Marge, Lisa, Bart and Maggie. If you look up Google stats connected to these five names, this is what you get:



Unsurprisingly, Homer and Bart are the most searched. It is a strange phenomenon that cartoons are very male-dominated: cartoon 'stars' are inevitably male, and what female characters exist tend to do so only in relation to the male leads: as girlfriends or family members. The Simpsons is 'about' Homer and Bart in a way it's not 'about' the other three, even if they occasionally have episodes devoted to them.

Comically, the recent Playboy featuring Marge has created a mammoth spike. Meaning that what intrigues people the most is naked cartoons. Ah, the male psyche, how I love thee.

Some other insights... Aussies lead the world in searches for every Simpson family member except Bart. Aussies come in at only #5 for Bart, while Uruguay leads the pack. Uruguay features no internet searches at all for the other four Simpsons. Hm.

Google Insights: potato

This time a blog dedicated merely to a certain word and to what we can dig up associated with it. The humble potato.



It's a nicely seasonal graph to be sure, with potato searching peaking in autumn. The overall country stats rather bizarrely feature Thailand foremost among potato googlers (where the fact that 'potato mp3' is a popular search m akes me think we're not talking tubers) before the English-speaking world features (#2 USA, #3 Australia, #4 Canada, #5 Zimbabwe...). Subnationally, there are no surprises that in the USA Idaho leads in potato searching and in Canada PEI leads. The Americans search most often for 'sweet potato', though 'baked potato', 'potato salad' and 'potato soup' rank ('potato chips' encouragingly comes in only at #10). In Britain, 'potato recipe' beats 'sweet potato' as the most popular search term, while intriguingly 'leek potato soup' comes in at #6 and, most intriguingly, 'jacket potato' and 'baked potato' are practically tied at #7 and #8 respectively ('jacket potato' is the British terminology for what Americans call 'baked potato'). Dan Quayle would be pleased to know that 'potatoe' (sic.) is the 9th most common potato-related search in the UK.

This blog mentions http://www.blogsurfer.us/ in it.

Google Insights: baby names

Okay, a quick and easy one this time. The Social Security Administration releases a list of the most popular names for new babies every year in the States. It's also a fascinating source of trends, how names fall into, and out of, fashion over the years.

So there are two graphs here: one showing the five top boys' names on 2008 and the other, well aren't you clever if you guessed it.

The boys who in a few years will find the constant need in school to use their surnames are: Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, Daniel. With the exception of Ethan, a very staid and Biblical list. Who googles what?



Well, isn't that useless? Obviously one rather significant celebrity death has completely thrown things awry here - though interesting to note that "Michael" was galloping ahead of the pack well before Mr. Jackson's death anyway, and Daniel outpaced the other three. Hm.

Looking internationally, the Danish love Jacob, Michael is widespread among English-speaking countries, Ethan seems to be an entirely American thing, Joshua tops lists in Africa, and Daniel seems to be popular throughout the Americas (both North and South).

The girls, a rather more eclectic, fashion-conscious and secular list: Emma, Isabella, Emily, Madison, Ava.



More intersting results: consistent different levels of interest, with spikes all over the place. I guess Madison tops the list due to non-girl's-name things, like the city in Wisconsin for example. I don't know if I've ever met a girl named Madison, actually. Emma has huge spikes, which may or may not have anything to do with Harry Potter movies (were there similar spikes for Daniel?)

It's the Swedes who love Emma most, the Danish who go for Isabella (which I always took to be a Spanish name), Americans go for Emily most, and the Belgians are all over Ava (I prefer the spelling 'Eva' myself). Madison, of course, is a big green Lower 48, as whatever uses the name has, they're all American phenomena.

Google Insights: pop, soda, coke

It's a strange little quirk of geography and linguistics that 'soft drinks', generically, go by three different names in the United States (more than that, really). 'Soda', which in other countries generally describes something different, 'pop', which has a million other meanings including a genre of music, and 'coke', which of course is actually the brand name of a particular drink. Don't get confused: I think in much of the world, or at least much of the States, 'coke' is used generically to mean any cola (i.e. Pepsi as well) - but what I mean here is people who would refer, for example, to Sprite or root beer as a 'coke'.

Well, here are the maps in all their splendour. I should mention that I actually looked for 'pop can', 'soda can' and 'coke can', mainly to try to get references to pop music weeded out.

This is the map for 'pop', which by the way in Canada is the most common word for it. You can see the dark blue is up north, but hardly country-wide. It's not exactly 'the northwest' either, for it goes dim when you get to the Atlantic coast as well (Vermont, on the Canadian border, is one of the palest in the country). So geographically, what is this area? The Midwest, I suppose, more or less. Hm.

This one is a bit confusing. Theoretically, 'soda' (seemingly by far the most popular) is bicoastal: you should see usage in the Northeast and in the entire West. While that is to an extent true, a few anomalies show up here: first, California ranks low. Second, Wisconsin (Midwest as they get) ranks high. Third, so does Florida, which is confusing in consideration of the third one:

Here's 'coke', a Southern map if there ever was one (though it spikes all the way up to Lake Michigan). I had figured this map would be less defined, since the flagship brand of the Coca-Cola Corporation is rather popular nationwide, but this map does exactly what it promises. Interesting to go back to my earlier entry on religions and compare 'coke' to 'Baptist', 'pop' to 'Lutheran'.

And I dare anyone to find meaning in that...

Google Insights: top-selling artists of 2003

I did this search to check on longevity in the music business. Google Insights goes back to January 2004, a time at which these artists would have been, presumably, been popular searches, as they are the artists responsible for the best-selling CDs of 2003 (one reason I chose 2003 instead of 2004 is that it's a more interesting list).

To see the stats themselves, the top five selling CDs in the USA in 2003 are:

1.  Get Rich or Die Tryin' / 50 Cent              6,535,809
2.  Come Away with Me / Norah Jones               5,137,468
3.  Meteora / Linkin Park                         3,478,361
4.  Fallen / Evanescence                          3,364,738
5.  Speakerboxx-Love / Outkast                    3,089,849

Ooh! Courier New! How very sexy... so sexy that I'm not going to correct the errors regarding the name of Outkast's album.

Anyway, so that's our starting point. Looking at this graph, we can see that Norah Jones was never as popular on Google as she was on CD players (logical when you consider that her main demographics include people who probably use the internet less often), Outkast had a surprising lack of steam (in 2003 it was as if they were the 'future of music'), and 50 Cent had an amazing 2005. There is, however, a general downward trend here - indicating that all stars do fade, sooner or later.

A bit of random stats: 50 Cent is most popular in Eritrea, Norah Jones in Madagascar (by far), Linkin Park in Nepal, Evanescence in Bolivia and, unique among the five, Outkast is most popular in the USA. Talk about globalisation. Or rather, talk about the domination of the American music industry worldwide...

Google Insights: DDR, BRD

So when I was a kid, I used to collect stamps. I think my reason for doing so was that 'a kid needs to collect something or other'. Anyway, some of the nicest looking stamps came from "DDR", which, it turns out, was East Germany

So anyway while looking at the sub-national maps on Google Insights (not every country gets one), I was wondering what search terms to look for that would bring out geographical distinctions in other countries (like I've done in the States a few times). Not knowing that much about Germany, I went back to my stamp-collecting days and tried "DDR". Bingo... there's that Iron Curtain, as if it had never gone away...

Sad, eh? But perhaps not that surprising... people researching their own local history or something. So of course it made sense to try "BRD", the acronym for the old West Germany, and the one featuring the indubitably awesome word "Bundesrepublik". Well? Here you go...

Isn't that strange? It turns out that only East Germans care about East Germany, but only East Germans care about West Germany too. The Cold War is a non-entity in the former West, it seems. Or rather perhaps politics doesn't make the Wessies tick. What does? Well, I couldn't think of much, until I stumbled on the thought of immigration, and tried "Turk":

There it is! There's West Germany! Where the Turks live!

Google Insights: whisperers

Ah, a well-travelled meme... when you search only the word 'whisperer', most of the related searches have to do with Jennifer Love Hewitt. However, there certainly have been a fair amount of things out there using the word 'whisperer' - a word that, otherwise, you will agree, is complete crap. Check it out:



It's actually a pretty interesting graph, how Cesar Milan and Jennifer Love Hewitt duked it out for whisper-supremacy before the Party of Five star blew dog-boy out of the water. As random stats go, it turns out they go for Ghost Whisperer most in Singapore (the USA isn't even in the top ten), Dog Whisperer most in the States, Horse Whisperer in South Africa and Baby Whisperer (which I admit I've never heard of) in New Zealand.

Google Insights: newspaper, diario, journal, صحيفة, газета

So I tried this before with the word 'school' on Google Trends, but you don't get the cool maps. So I tried it again. This is the word 'newspaper' in English, Spanish, French, Arabic and Russian: five languages that to me seemed sufficiently multinational. The resulting maps do, to a limited extent, show the parts of the world where those languages are spoken, though of course 'journal' is a problem, being also an English word. Nonetheless, here you are:

There's the English-speaking world, more or less. Interesting how the UK, the USA, Canada, South Africa and Australia don't even show up in the top ten, which, apart from Bangladesh, is dominated by African countries. In so many searches do I see that cool swath across anglophone Africa from Namibia to Kenya.

How the Spanish-speaking world is dominated by South America... from Argentina on down, it's pretty much all Latin America save Spain itself. I didn't bother to check whether 'diario' is also Portuguese, but I guess it is since the only hues of colour in Africa are in Angola and Mozambique, two Lusophonic parts of Africa.

I didn't think the French one would work, what with 'journal' being a common word in English too. When at first you see all that dark yellow in French West Africa, it seems good. Yet Iran, India and especially Burma are tough to reconcile, and I have no idea why Canada and the USA should be the exact same colour here.

The Arabic one is as interesting for its gaps as for its greens. Yep, that's certainly the Arabic-speaking word. But note for example Iraq's absence. Or how Yemen is much greener than Oman. or, most strikingly, how the Sudan is darkest where its neighbour Egypt is as pale as the USA. Interesting also how Moroccan, Algerians and Tunisians clearly prefer to find their news in French. Of course I know how variant a language Arabic is. It could be that that far west they use a different word.

In the end perhaps the most interesting map in that it shows just how much the effects of previous union linger. In the case of the Ukraine and Belarus, it might be that the local word for 'newspaper' is the same as the standard Russian. But that doesn't go far to explain central Asia and the Caucasus, where people seem more inclined to search in Russian than in their own languages.

Google Insights: blood, sweat, tears

I guess what Churchill actually said was 'blood, toil, tears and sweat'. But as three of those are bodily fluids and the fourth isn't, the jazz/pop group was right to kick it out. Here, i follow their lead.

No surprise that 'blood' steals the show (averaging 58 versus 7 for tears and 4 for sweat), with people searching for 'blood pressure', 'half blood prince' and 'true blood' (whatever that third one is). The map of where people are searching for blood (no pun intended, we presume) is pretty much just a map of the English-speaking world. With 'sweat', you get the exciting combo of 'Keith Sweat' and 'sweat pants', and 'tears', which for some reason is most popular in the Philippines, seems to have the most to do with Eric Clapton...

Google Insights: alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon

The first five letters of the Greek alphabet. 'Delta' is reliably the most-Googled, having a hotel chain, an airline and a geographical feature associated with it (Googled most in the United States and in Nigeria, and within the USA Googled most in Alabama), but 'beta' has the most peaks and valleys (most sought in Mauritania, where it must mean something other than half-finished computer programmes). By a large margin it's the Dutch who are most interested in 'gamma', but 'alpha' and 'epsilon' still belong to their rightful owners the Greeks.

Google Insights will also tell you which search phrases including the word in question are being Googled. So with 'alpha', it's the perhaps Biblically motivated 'alpha omega' that's most sought, tied with the perhaps sorority motivated 'alpha kappa alpha'. 'Windows beta' is the search term that wins for 'beta', 'gamma ray' comes in #2 behind 'praxis', something that a Dutch person will hopefully explain to me one day, 'delta delta delta' at #1 is definitely a sorority reference, and the winning search term for 'epsilon' is 'sigma epsilon', which perhaps makes sense to the Greek.

Google Insights: October

With Google Insights, you can overlay different times, showing how often a single search term was Googled in, for example, different calendar years. You can't embed the result for some reason, but the graph above shows the results for "October". As you can suspect, people Google "October" most often in October (and the end of September too, logically). I suppose the fact that 2008 outperformed 2007, 2006 and 2005 is just because more people use the internet and more people use Google every year.

So in 2009 it has been the Irish who Googled "October" most so far, while it was the Philippines in 2008, the USA in 2007, and Nigeria in 2006 and 2005. I have no idea what to make of those stats.

Google Insights: Oscar winners

The lifespan of a Hollywood movie: shorter even than the lifespan of certain species of beetle. I wasn't expecting perennial interest, but this does make an interesting graph of the quick rise and quick drop-off of Osscar-winning movies. This represents four of the five most recent Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards ('Brokeback Mountain' lost to 'Crash', a film whose title is too generic to mean much of anything, but still got more Google hits than any other movie here). In each case, the year of their release shows a huge spike, but then an immediate drop-off after that.

Also interesting: the USA shows up at only #9 for searches for "Slumdog Millionaire". The remainder of the top ten is made up entirely of: India (#2), its subcontinental neighbours (Sri Lanka #1, Bangladesh #5, Pakistan #8) or Indian-culturally-influenced countries (UAE #3, Mauritius #4, Singapore #6, Trinidad & Tobago #10). The United States led the searches for each of the others except "Million Dollar Baby", where it came #2 to Italy.

Google Insights: Baptist, Mormon, Lutheran, Catholic, Methodist

One of the first things I fell in love with on Google Insights was the map function. I am even more of a map geek than I am a stat geek, so I was now in absolute heaven. I tried to find a stat-map that actually had some kind of meaning, and I stumbled across the idea of looking at searches various Christian religions on a state-by-state basis. It’s amazing just how religiously heterogeneous the United States really is and the extent to which each of the fifty so-called ‘states’, while from an international perspective hopelessly similar, actually do have distinct characters. So the graph is included here, but who cares? It’s the maps that steal the show.

The blue map is for the word ‘baptist’, which doesn’t necessarily denote the denomination (there’s John the Baptist, for example), but does tend to. And Bible Belt? Here you have it… the South are busy searching for Baptist this and Baptist that, while not a single state north of the Mason-Dixon line shows up on the Top Ten.

Of course Utah Googled the word “Mormon” the most. If any other result had turned up, I’d have called fraud. But I certainly didn’t expect a result this drastic: Utah so red that Senator McCarthy would rather be dead than visit there, but no one else except for Utah’s immediate neighbours care in the least. Hm.

I don’t know much about Lutherans, and just included this one through some random memory that one of the States bordering Canada had more Lutherans than anywhere else in the States. Yet what a beautiful map: a very specific chunk of the United States likes to Google the word “Lutheran”.

Don’t know what, if anything, to make of the Catholic map: Louisiana is a nice remnant of French rule, but apart from that I had thought it was the Atlantic coast, in particular Massachusetts and New York, where the Catholics lived. If so, I guess they don’t Google themselves. Nebraska I can’t explain at all.

I included Methodists because I couldn’t really think of a fifth… but of a strange map, similar to the Baptists but a bit more widespread. And I think Nebraskans just like Googling religions…

Google Trends: Google Trends, Google Insights

Ohmigod ohmigod ohmigod… How could I have not seen it? How could I not have seen “Google Insights”, which is like 300% cooler than “Google Trends”? This service, which is pretty much the same thing but improved and using a lot of Adobe Flash, probably should have just been issued as ‘updates to the Google Trends platform’. But those wacky people at Google clearly know better than mere humans like us… so now in the quest for odd pieces of statistical information, I’ll integrate the two services and use little bits of info from both.

Note that Google Insights is actually over a year old: hardly earth-shattering news. I’m just a bit slow to the punch…

Google Trends: Google, Yahoo, Microsoft

So how weird is it that, even though Google has resoundingly kicked the ass of Yahoo! as search-engine-du-jour, more people Google Yahoo! than Google Google itself? And how weird was that sentence?

I’m a bit sceptical of Microsoft’s low, and lowering, performance here, though of course Google and Yahoo! are branded by their url, whereas Microsoft uses ‘MSN’ as its main internet portal. Adding ‘MSN’ to the mix makes more sense, as it itself is Googled 2.8 times more often than ‘Microsoft’, though still less than Google and Yahoo! And, interestingly, stable across the years whereas Google and Yahoo! are steadily climbing.

Though it’s IT-paradise India that tops the list for Googling both Google and Microsoft, the city that Googles Microsoft most is, hilariously, Seattle, Washington. Perhaps they’re engaging in Google-bombing at HQ?

Oddly enough, India comes in only at 7^th on the Yahoo! list. It’s Malaysia that leads the pack there.

Google Trends: fee, fi, fo, fum

When cloud-living giants use Google, what do they look for? Well, probably in consort with ‘Wi’, ‘fi’ leads the pack, followed closely by the money-hungry ‘fee’. ‘Fo’ comes in third, and ‘fum’, which in no way rhymes with ‘Englishman’, trails at the end, with less than one-fiftieth of the Google-power of ‘fee’ and ‘fi’.

The blood might be English, but ‘fum’ wins in Romania, where it presumably means something. It’s the Indians who go for ‘fo’, the Finnish who Google their country’s internet domain the most, and the Indians again who are most interested in paying those fees.

Google Trends: John, Paul, George, Ringo

How interesting that searches for these four names should, by and large, reflect the relative artistic and critical significances of the four Beatles in question, with ‘John’ towering over the rest, followed by ‘Paul’ and ‘George’ in close succession and with ‘Ringo’ fading into insignificance at only one-ninety-fifth of John’s search count.

Obviously, of course, the vast majority of people searching for Johns, Pauls and Georges are looking for people other than Messrs. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison. A certain papal death, for example, explains the twin spikes on ‘John’ and ‘Paul’ in early 2005 (at exactly the same time that I imagine ‘Benedict’ searches climb above Ringo-levels). It’s tough, on the other hand, to imagine any reason other than Mr. Starr why people might be searching for the word ‘Ringo’.

It is quite interesting, I think, that all four of these search terms seem to be dropping with time. I don’t think there are fewer Johns in the world today than there were in 2004. I wonder if it merely means that fewer people are using Google to find people these days: thank you Facebook?

Quick facts: Peruvians love Ringo the most (probably because the word means something in Spanish), Australians George, the Irish Paul and the English George.

Giving the Beatles surnames confirms the roll call, with Lennon at number one and poor Richard Starkey in the basement. Turns out it’s the Norwegians who love Mr. Conductor most, the Argentineans who love the Hindu sitarist, Canadians who love Macca and Mexicans who love Mr. Ono.

Can anyone explain that massive spike in John Lennon Googling at the end of 2005?

Google Trends: Schule, école, escuela, sekolah

In checking out Google Trends among languages, I decided to focus on the word ‘school’. I wanted to see what the trends looked like in various languages around the world. The first thing I learned was how incredibly dominant the English language is in Google searches, with the English word ‘school’ overpowering the others so much that it quite defeated the purpose. So erasing English from the equation, I am left with “Schule” in German, “école” in French, “escuela” in Spanish and “sekolah” in Bahasa Indonesia.

It seems, then, that Spanish wins. Not surprisingly, I suppose, in that it’s spoken in so many countries. I was surprised to find how badly Bahasa Indonesia performed, since Indonesia is no small country. Global distribution of Internet users, I suppose, or at least of Google users.

It’s really a beautiful graph though, with its intricate series of peaks and valleys more or less identical among the three European languages, with sudden dips corresponding to school breaks in February, in summer and at Christmas time. The country searches offer no real surprises, with ‘sekolah’ being searched to any real extent only in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei, ‘école’ mainly in francophone France, Morocco, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada, ‘Schule’ in Switzerland, Germany and Austria, and ‘escuela’ in a huge list of countries, all Spanish-speaking. Mexico tops the list, Colombia comes in at #10 (Google Trends shows no more than that). In Switzerland they search for ‘Schule’ about three times as often as they search for ‘école’, but Lausanne looks very bilingual indeed as the two terms are Googled more or less equally.

Google Trends: winter, spring, summer, fall

Here’s a very pretty graph to get us started. As you might expect, people search for certain seasons on Google more often during that season than at other times of the year. Thus, each search term here has annual peaks and valleys, exactly as expected. The incredible stupidity of the fourth season having two names means that searches for ‘autumn’ are not included – though they’re far less than these four anyway. I’m not surprised that ‘summer’ is the most searched-for term, but I am surprised that winter comes in fourth. I also find 2008 very intriguing, where three of the four seasons experienced a sudden spike and spring in particular went haywire. What was so interesting in the spring of 2008 about the word ‘spring’?

No surprise that Canadians searched the most for ‘winter’, but odd that the city with the most searches for ‘winter’ is Orlando, Florida – perhaps Canadian snowbirds Googling pictures of the season they were no longer experiencing. It’s the Americans who Googled ‘spring’ and ‘summer’ most, but for ‘fall’ (which of course does have a secondary meaning), the #1 country inexplicably becomes the Philippines. What is it the Filipinos love so much about that season?

Understanding Google Trends: Introduction

What is Google Trends? Frankly, I have no idea. I mean, I know what it is, but I’m not really sure why anyone would use it. It shows, going back a few years, how many people at any given time have searched for any particular word or phrase. It also shows how many news articles have mentioned the same phrase, and it offers gobs of information about which cities and countries search most for it. For people who love statistics for their own sake, it’s hours of meaningless information. For everyone else, it’s a meaningless bore. Personally, I’m a bit of both groups of people, and in this blog I will, for no clear reason that I can understand, analyse for your benefit certain Google Trends.

Hell, why not, right?