Google Trends

I discovered Google Trends today, all thanks to Valentine’s Day! You see, my local flower shop closed down, so I was researching new ones just in case. Then I thought to myself, “geez whiz Anton, I wonder how many other guys are googling flower shops? If only there was a way to find out!” So I began searching for a way to find out and stumbled upon my answer.

Its quite interesting, every year, there are two big spikes. Why? Well the first one corresponds quite nicely with Valentine’s Day. The other corresponds nicely with Mother’s Day as well. I found this VERY interesting, and you know what? I got hooked.

Here’s some more interesting tidbits I found.

Paris Hilton

Kim Kardashian

Screech (From Saved By The Bell)

The three of them each have a significant spike. Interestingly enough, the spikes occur when news of a “sex tape” came up. Here’s some others:

Math

This one is interesting, because it follows the same trend over and over again. Big sharp drops for Christmas, then 1-2 months of drops in the summer time. Did you guess it? Yup, Christmas Holidays and Summer Vacation. The times when students are least likely to be googling for answers.

Sex

This one didn’t turn up that much of an interesting result (the small spike for christmas isn’t that interesting), what is interesting, however, is where the people who did search for it, are from:

I’m actually quite surprised by this. Vietnam number 2? I seriously thought the Japanese or Americans would be in the top ten!

UTSC

A search for my school, UTSC, were somewhat weird, but interesting. The spikes a 3rd into the year probably corresponds to new university students. Its good to see the number rising. Something more interesting was the languages of the people who searched for UTSC:

The majority of OS are defaulted to english, so it must of taken A LOT of operating systems defaulted to Chinese to make it on the graph.

Computer Science

Unfortunately, computer science is on the decline (enrollment HAS been declining since the dot-com bubble burst), so this is not too surprising.

Another cool feature with google trends, is that it lets you compare data. So I decided to compare Django and Ruby on Rails.

Django (red) Vs. RoR (blue)

You can really see the raising popularity of Django, and how RoR’s popularity is slowly going down. There’s probably more cool trends to be found on Google Trends, but I’m satisfied for now.