Bloggers have long used Google, and its various facets, to gather information. Despite Roves wishes, it is the Democrats who are taking advantage of the Internet, not Republicans. I mean who needs Google, or Blogging, when you have the NSA?
But I digress. I figured I would do some data mining of my own. Google offers many tools to the savvy sleuth who seeks the truth, but the tool I will explore today is Google Trends. With this new tool we can see what the world is searching for. This peek into what is on the minds of every day folks can be very telling. Type a word into the box and Google Trends shows you, in chart form, the search levels for that term for the last 2 years. Type 2 words separated by a comma and you get a comparison chart.
Thusly:
Now that you have a handle on the possibilities lets jump right in....
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Knowing that pie seems to be popular around holidays, and more so than cake, is fine and good , but I am hungry for different information. Like I said, Google is a treasure chest of knowledge.
Google Video has hours of political video and speeches.
Google Images, is all I need when I am working on my
political collages.
Google News Alerts send me weekly updates on topics I find interesting. More Blog fodder sent right to my inbox.
Google Earth is a must. With it you can fly anywhere on the planet. They have even added a cool feature that allows you to view Blog locations all over the planet.
But Google Trends was new to me. Lets see what I found.
Disclaimer: I have no idea what math is behind google trends and make no claims as to the accuracy of any of my findings. I simply submit that overall patterns seem to emerge and it can be fun to delve into the collective mind of the people around us.
For the most part I have refined the region to "United States". You can select any region of the world for different results. My thoughts are posted in green in the images below.
With that, lets go to the charts:
Thanks for reading. Tell a friend.