Google does it again

Not really paying attention during the Google lecture last week, I was clicking around Google Labs when I found their cool new feature, Google Trends. Moments after I had made my discovery, with the intention of sharing it with the class, Professor Maier directed the class to it, a la the direction he had received from Aaron. Dang, scooped again.

Still, I would have been happy to know about the site had I not found it, and the application for others is rather beneficial. I can see this as surpassing the quotation of the number of from Google in news stories. What Trends does is tracks the frequency of searches on what seems to be the world's favorite search engine--I'm not about to verify that beyond our combined anecdotal evidence.

One of the most illustrative and telling examples of how Trends works in the input of "Janet Jackson" in the search box. It returns this graph:

All results for Trends start with January 2004, presumably the start date for the program, though why Google couldn't dig further back over time, like the Time's ever-expanding on-line archive, waits to be seen. The above graph is pretty self-explanatory, with a meteoric number of search results surrounding Ms. Jackson shortly after her "wardrobe malfunction."

The class thought we were on to something when one classmate searched for "boobies." We all chuckled at the correlation, but when I was showing Trends to a friend and we gave both a shot, I realized the "boobies" query actually took place some months later. This is more clearly illustrated by using the comparative search results, which include commas between the queries, in this case, "janet jackson, boobies."

Clearly that didn't work, but it instead proves the volume of Janet searches, which function as an outlier that drowns out the boobie search, that looks like this:
Now inserting that image deleted my above one, which showed the first graph and then just a red line. If you want to see a comparison, I'd advise you check "janet jackson, boobies" out on your own via the above Trends link. It would seem I can get no more than three images, or something from Blogger--a the adventure that is this business.

Anyway, this is a powerful tool that allows you to know about when people were looking for words and to compare them to other searches. If only we could get specific dates and counts, that would be something powerful, but far too telling to marketers to be profitable for Google. They may profess not to be evil, but it still comes down to the dollar in the business of organizing the world's information, non?