Google Trends
May 11th, 2006Steve Rubel’s post, 25 Things I Learned on Google Trends is a fun look into world search trends using the new Google Trends.
What I enjoy is not only what search trends are developing, but how one search item compares with another. Seeing where the less politically correct searches are popular is also extremely interesting.
Sex is obviously a lot more popular than drugs for searches, but it’s mentioned just about as often in the media—rock and roll almost doesn’t even register. Cairo, Egypt gets the award for searching for “sex” most often with most of those searches being done in Arabic. Prostitution, however, is most searched for in Montreal.
Backmasking is most searched for in Melbourne, Australia, and it’s hard to say for sure, but it looks like it had a spike in January when the Wall Street Journal did that story about it, and again lots of other spikes as other big organizations and networks picked up the story.
Pepsi appears more popular than either term—Coke or Coca-cola, and Yahoo is still more popular than Google but they’re closing the gap.
Please post interesting Google Trend finds in the comments.
May 11th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Big Love is only as popular a trend as Sopranos in Salt Lake City.
May 12th, 2006 at 5:46 am
Jeff, I can tell you that backmasking was what led me to your site. I am one of those people living in Melbourne who searched for backmasking. One or two of the spikes on backmasking would have been from a music show called Spicks and Specks that is shown in Melbourne. A segment of their show was all about guessing backmasked songs. Then the host went on to list all the strange words on the backmasked songs. This led me to search for it on Google.
Also afterwards I found a popular thread about backmasking on a forum that I regularly visit and it had a link to your site, which is how I stumbled onto your site and have been visiting it ever since.
May 23rd, 2006 at 1:03 am
Urine is more popular in India (over coffee and chocolate) than in the USA (where coffee comes out tops)