Google Trends: Part 2

I read a rather interesting article last night, “MySpace shrinks as Facebook, Twitter, and Bebo grabs its users“, and I thought to myself, “That might be an interesting Google Trend to See”.  So I went on Google Trends again, and lots of fun stuff was discovered. Have a look.

According to this trend, I don’t believe Bebo affected myspace at all. Even Twtter hasn’t been much of an impact. Its Facebook that seems to have had the biggest impact. At the beginning of 2008, it was about the same, until Facebook began its explosive growth.

At this point, I got interested in finding “periodic trends”, so here’s a few of those:

Best Buy has big spikes at the end of each month. This is probably due to Black Friday, and Christmas/Boxing Day.

Wine is surprisingly periodic as well. But as you can see, its always near the end of the year, where people are having lots of parties and dinners. The same trend  can be seen with Turkey:

So you got your Thanksgiving peak and the Christmas peak. There’s a mini-peak before the big Thanksgiving one. That’s probably due to our Canadian Thanksgiving. Here’s one I can’t explain:

Why is breakfast periodic? And what does it peak during the summer? There’s too many possibilities. Maybe people are sleeping more during the summer, so they wake up and have time for breakfast? Or possibly because people are on vacation, and wanna try out some breakfast. Lets see what the trend is for vacataion:

As you can see, the breakfast and vacation graphs match each other rather well. Especially in the summer! However, people on winter vacations don’t seem to be so interested in breakfast.

Lets check out the trends for pie and pi. I didn”t expect pie to be periodic, but I expected pi to be so:

But I was proven wrong. Spikes for pi (pi day), and spikes for pie near the end of the year. Pies are usually eaten at thanksgiving dinner and at christmas, so this probably explains it.

A really nice graph I found, was for sports:

Very nice graphs! All periodic, I’m guessing, peaking for the finals, then falling during the off seasons. Its quite interesting as well, because you can see the various sports scheduling their finals so that there’s no “conflicts” with other major sports.

We can look at various past times as well:

I liked these results even more. Vacation peaks in winter and summer, skiing peaks during the winter, and small gardening peaks in the summer.

I decided to look up Kama Sutra. Why? I don’t know. I just did. The results per region were very interesting though:

Very surprising, I thought India would be first, since they were the creators, but no, it was little ol’ Indonesia!

At this point, I decided to get a bit more serious, and touch on a very serious subject: Rape. The results weren’t intereseting, however the locations were:

As you can see, our friend “Pakistan” makes up a huge chunk of the searches. Unfortunately, women’s rights in Pakistan isn’t too strong, and you frequently hear stories about “honor killings”.

On a happier note, lets check out programming:

India comes out on top. I guess it makes sense, considering how many projects are outsourced to them.

Hope you enjoyed this session of Google Trending!