Google Trends. Google is more popular than sex

Ben Shoemate was playing with Google Trends yesterday. See his post below:

With a few keystrokes you can satisfy your need for both useless trivia interesting facts and the data to back it up. Where else can you discover that basset hounds are more popular in Hungary, that Hillary Clinton is finally more popular than her husband, or that in spring of 2007, google became more popular than sex: Here are some more fasinating trends (at least to me).
People search for terms like “full moon” with the clockwork regularity of celestial events like, well, like full moons.The holidays also show a steady heartbeat in search.

I thought it was strange that “Earth day” would be more popular than Easter.But then i remembered two things. First people are still working on Earth day, so they are at their computers, and second, google skews the results with those cartoon logos they put on their main search page. When you click it, it searches for that term. So bottom line, this just means more people are using google on Earth day than Easter. It makes sense but also reminds us that we have to take these graphs with a grain of salt.


Other things that follow a pattern: American Idol, which is apparently very popular in the Philippines. IBM’s star is falling (its as popular now as summer is in the winter) and Lenovo’s is rising.

Point A in the graph is where Lenovo bought IBM’s PC business. One last graph, this one ties into both IBM and portals. Since I spent a lot of time helping clients get value from their portal investments, lets look at where the market interest lies.

This may be apples and oranges since Sharepoint is used for collaboration more than portals (and I’ve always felt it creates silos for information more than it tears them down, but thats the subject of a later blog.) Tell me about the interesting trends you discover in the comments.

Thanks for the great stuff Ben.