make clean

trendy

Tonight, I happened across Google Trends. willyk and I proceeded to spend the next two hours typing in queries and examining results. the information presented was amazing. I'm not at the point where I want to go attempting to influence people's opinions about anything we came across (yet), but there were a few things worth noting.

First (disclaimer), one must accept that there are a huge number of unknowns in any of these searches. Aside from the obvious things like ``how many people actually use google'', and ``did google possibly modify these results'', things like the original context are completely lost. This matters because doing a search for ``chemistry'' can also yield results like ``I never want to see any chemistry again'' (depending of course on the intelligence of the search engine - another unknown).

All that aside, the gross generalizations it was possible to make were still amazing and unexpected. I don't know if google perhaps does some sort of scaling based upon relative sizes of the countries (I would hope not, but it might better explain some of the results, but the simple fact that the U.S. isn't top rank for everything searched is nothing short of amazing.


Groups (note relative graphs):
good vs. evil
chemistry, physics, and math
seasons


Singletons (note countries, mostly):
c.s. - integer, floating-point, and algorithm


Do your own searches, and post up links to any interesting ones.

P.S. This search, however, is enough to make me doubt the validity of the entire site.

posted by toasty @ 11/04/2006 11:54:00 PM