Thursday, May 11, 2006

A flashlight into our culture

In grad school, I did a project (using the web pages crawled for Google -- before it was incorporated) on analyzing trends of words on the web over time. We noticed that "mosaic" was going down at the time and "retail" was becoming more popular. You could also use the data to see significant events, like superbowl, when IE shipped, etc. Over the years, I always thought this would be a useful research tool.

So I was really excited when Google Trends launched on labs last week. The UI is nice and it lets you see the data over time and also over cities/regions/languages. Here are some examples: tea vs coffee or sushi vs steak. Or guess where they love JLo the most. You can have a lot of fun with this and learn a lot about what people around the world like. Please leave a comment with any good examples you find.

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

lame examples

big breasts

the f word

10:06 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i like it, but i hope to see soon something like worldtraker for google as well!

7:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i like it, but i hope to see soon something like worldtraker for google as well!

7:15 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

i d like it could let people do deeper research over keywords

9:26 AM  

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