While I’m not much a fan of some of the ways Google has done business, particularly with regard to China, I never fail to be amazed by the new tools they come up with. Google Trends - a cool new tool offered by Google which allows you to track the search and news trends of given keywords. For instance, Phish. When you google trend Phish, you see the peaks that occured around the time they announced they were breaking up, around the time of the final concert, around the time of their new individual side projects, etc… Fun tool.
As an extention, you can pit two keywords against each other to check how the trends compare. Global Warming is getting a lot of attention lately…another fun issue (in the same vein as Global Warming) is “Peak Oil“. Google Trends the two and you’ll see that peak oil isn’t getting the attention global warming has garnered quite yet…but I have a feeling it will with time. If I have it in me, I’ll write more about my impression of this whole Peak Oil theory someday (hint: time to put on the tin-foil hat) .
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July 10, 2006 at 12:25 pm
Anonymous
Checked out the GW/PO trends…any thoughts on the apparent periodic cycle for GW in ‘04 and ‘05??
Fewer people sitting in front of their computers in the summer? More school papers on the subject at the end of the year? Wishful thinking as winter sets in?
-JL
December 6, 2006 at 2:14 pm
Anonymous
Jake - I found it somewhat surprising to look at the recent Google Trends data around peak oil & global warming. Check out my recent post on this
-Tom–>