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...