Google Insights: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

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The days of the week. Or rather the weekdays, since Google Insights only allows five search terms.

Now the graph's dynamic, so what I write today will inevitably change. But it's sure to have that cool sawtooth look to it, and I bet it's sure tho have Friday towering over the rest - which makes sense if you think about it. Though as I write this, Friday and Monday have been neck-and-neck till recently, when Friday's taken off like a rocket. For some reason.



People Googling 'Monday' are most often looking for 'Monday Monday' and are, by a large majority, most often Kenyan (Kenyans don't Google the other four days). People Googling 'Tuesday' are most likely American and, suitably, are most often Googling 'Ruby Tuesday'. Wednesday belongs to New Zealand, but there being no song, it's 'On Wednesday' and 'Sheffield Wednesday' that top the list. Australians lead on Thursday, a day with seemingly a lot to do with football. 'Thursday Night' leads the pack. The Americans lead with Friday, Googling 'Black Friday' most, which I guess explains the recent increase in Friday-Googling. Ah, those Americans...

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Google Insights: Poor Chile

Poor, poor Chile. It hasn't been a good year. Or rather it has. I guess. It just depends on what you're looking for.

This isn't the whole world; the whole world includes Chile, and Chileans tend to Google Chile quite often. So it's the United States, where Googling Chile is way more common in Virginia and California than anywhere else. For some reason.



This is just the year 2010. Clearly, people Google Chile only when it's in the news. An earthquake, and some trapped miners. What interests the world (or more technically the USA) about Chile is what's under the ground.

American States: second most popular sport

So I tried the Google Insights / Inkscape trick again to make another map. I would have liked to make a map showing which sport is most popular (where 'most popular' means 'most Googled' in which state, but that would have been pretty boring: a single-coloured map in which 'football' is most popular in all fifty states. Without exception.

Of course, this being the USA, 'football' refers not to the sport of the World Cup but the one of the Super Bowl. Or at least in theory it does: who can tell what people are actually looking for when they type 'football' into Google's search engine.

Anyway... removing football from the list and replacing it with the other big sports - baseball, basketball, hockey and soccer (yes the other football) - suddenly presents an intriguing map:

It's an odd one. The only one it's easy to say much about is hockey: the sport thrives in northern states, along the Canadian border. None of the states coloured blue here has an NHL franchise, but with the exception of the Green Bay Packers neither do they have a franchise in any of the other main professional team sports. Washington State uniquely prefers soccer, something not easy to explain. You might chalk it up to Washington's large immigrant community, but certainly a good many states here have high immigrant populations.

Now... baseball vs. basketball? It's tough to see what's happening here. The South and the Northeast seem to prefer baseball, but why? And why is the heartland so basketball-happy?

I can only make a stab at an answer. The populous states, containing big cities, seem to prefer baseball: California, Texas, Florida, Illinois, New York. Perhaps states with successful baseball franchises get the interest in baseball, whereas states with no MLB team gravitate to basketball. Why? Well, like American football, basketball is also a college sport, and the NCAA competes for attention with the NBA. Perhaps it's the college level, something baseball doesn't really have, that pushes it ahead.

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American States: big cities

I've done up two maps of the USA, using Inkspace and Google Insights. The first one, this one, was perhaps better in concept than in execution. But oh well. Anyway, what I did was to take five 'regional hub' cities, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Houston and Los Angeles, and see in each of the 50 states which of the five was Googled most often. I expected to find obvious results in New York State, Illinois, Georgia, Texas and California, but it was the other 45 states I was curious about. The results:

The principle was right: there are 'regions' in the States where people gravitate towards certain big cities - if for no other reason than because they're following the nearest big sports team. So in particular there's a three-state 'zone' (or 'tristate' as they say there) around Houston and around Atlanta. What surprised me was not the fact that New York appears to be the 'default' (among other things, it is of course also the name of a state) but (1) that outside of California itself there is no state where Los Angeles is Googled more often than the others on this list and (2) Chicago has a huge 'zone' of eleven states, extending as far away as Wyoming. Intriguing, and not something I can entirely explain. What has people in Wyoming more interested in Googling Chicago than any other of these cities?

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Google Insights: death spikes

It's a sad reality that people are interested in celebrities dying. So much so, in fact, that the news of a celebrity's death causes a momentary surge of interest in that celebrity. In the case of Michael Jackson, that was enough to more or less swamp the whole internet. You can pick out exactly when these celebrities died by looking at worldwide searches for them from 2004 to present:













All deaths are not equal, however. Obviously Michael Jackson's death is something unprecedented in the history of the internet, but beyond that:



It turns out that, while Michael Jackson dwarfs everyone else so much that events before his death still trump other people's deaths. The aftershock of his death was still greater than the news of Patrick Swayze's death. Corey Haim's is too new to compare, but Heath Ledger's was a pretty high spike. George Carlin's was surprisingly low. Google Insights wouldn't let me compare Farrah Fawcett to other people, for some reason...

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