25 Things I Learned on Google Trends

To give you a sense of its tremendous power for tapping into the world psyche, here are 25 things I learned on Google Trends. Someone should start a blog on this kind of stuff.

1) Almost all of the ten biggest US markets for MySpace are on the West Coast

2) There's more interest in Bluetooth than in Wifi

3) PR is starting to come close to catching advertising. AdAge still bests PR Week

4) David Hasselhoff's popularity in Germany is declining

5) Jerry Lewis's popularity in France is rising

6) Blackberry is widening its lead over the Treo

7) Zacharias Moussaoui finally beat OJ Simpson in searches

8) Hockey is starting to surpass baseball in popularity, but they fall way behind football (no matter which way it is defined)

9) New York still tops LA!

10) The Kryptonite Lock got more PR from the blog blow-up than any other event during the past two years

11) TV is kicking the movies butt

12) Dogs are by far killing all other pets while cats and fish battle for second place

13) Democrats vs. Republicans? Yup, they're neck and neck and on my screen red and blue!

14) YouTube is huge in the Philippines. Call it the Mike Abundo effect.

15) Blogs have caught up to newspapers. Boing Boing and Gizmodo are close to catching the WSJ

16) The beach is more popular than the mountains

17) Wikipedia is huge in Eastern Europe and it started to lead Britannica, Encarta and Webster's in 2004

18) Digg is still way behind CNET but it caught up to Slashdot. MySpace speed ahead of AOL last year

19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis

20) Flickr is the king of tagging, followed by del.icio.us and furl

21) Web 2.0 is huge in Korea - even bigger than in San Francisco

22) Elvis and The Beatles are in a dead heat

23) Word is more popular than any other Office app. Outlook and Excel are in a tie, followed by Powerpoint.

24) Bill Gates is slaughtering Steve Jobs in searches

25) Google is bigger than God?

Technorati Tags: Google Trends, Google, Trends

Comments

[Ralf]

Steve, if you search for BEACH, you should search also for MOUNTAIN - singular the gap gets smaller!

[fantababy]

Also Google is bigger than microsoft.

[Mike Abundo]

We Filipinos are just natural adopters of social media, Steve. Community collaboration is one of our core cultural values. :)

[Todd Zeigler]

I'd keep in mind that Google has said itself that the data on Google Trends may not be accurate:

"The data Google Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that Trends makes use of. We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably don't want to write your PhD dissertation based on this information."

Also, if you've worked on search engine campaigns, you know it's really hard to predict the keywords folks will use to find your product or company.

Google Trends is an interesting tool, but I'd be cautious in making sweeping statements based on the data.

[scott]

Damn, Steve, you are a geek!!!

Also look up: "Going outside beats staying in a dark room playing with your laptop."

(I know...I'm one to talk. But John Wagner reports, kind of like Logan in Logan's Run, that the outdoors still exists.)

[jbebe]

so , what does this mean? :)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=Google%2C+%E7%99%BE%E5%BA%A6&ctab=0&date=all&geo=CN

[Joel Burslem]

Steve,

Great post. I've taken your idea and run with it for the Real Estate market... some very interesting results there too!

http://realestatemarketing.wordpress.com/2006/05/11/google-trends-an-fascinating-research-tool/

[Dave]

re: point 2 (wifi vs. bluetooth), there's probably more interest in bluetooth because people are trying to figure out how to get their damn headsets to work. No need to worry about something that works well. Point being, Google Trends pages shouldn't be over interpreted.

[Manoj]

Google is bigger than God but smaller than Sex

[nuno bastei]

"Jerry Lewis's popularity in France is rising": nice shot! Come on, Jerry, go buy a house in the Cote d'Azur.

[Dimitar Vesselinov]

17) Wikipedia is huge in Eastern Europe...

Also, SMS is very popular in Eastern Europe, India and Pakistan.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=sms&ctab=1&date=all&geo=all
http://www.google.com/trends?q=sms%2C+%22free+sms%22&ctab=1&date=all&geo=all

[John-Erling Holmenes Fredriksen]

You say potato, I say potato. They're still tied...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=potato%2C+potato&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

[Jim]

With regards to football - does this include "football" in Europe and the rest of the world, or is it specifically "American Football"?

[Matías]

You should also take into account that Open Office is catching up to MS Word, almost beating it up

[[GEEKS ARE SEXY] Tech. News]

The thing you can find with google trends are pretty darn amazing, you can really paint a good portrait of what the digital society looks like at a certain point in time with it.. Once again, Google came up with a great idea.

[Rafael Ebron]

And don't forget...
http://www.google.com/trends?q=firefox%2Cinternet+explorer

[Kevin Jump]

yes but 2 is the most popular number.

why?

[Joe H.]

And Yahoo is bigger than Google...

[florian]

number 19 shows how statistics can be used to tell whatever you want them to say... try removing the "s" from the keywords and you get a completely different result. actually nobody cares about podcasts:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=podcast%2C+blog%2C+RSS%2C+wiki&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

[Kevan]

Oh yeah? "free" has the advantage on any of these. This explains what OSS proponents really want.

but I'll tell you what. "the" kicks butt:

[Jass]

china is more popular than sex, in Hong Kong :)

http://www.google.com/trends?q=china%2C+sex&ctab=1&geo=all&date=all

[Julian]

Actually, wiki outperforms everthing else:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=podcasting%2C+blogs%2C+RSS%2C+wiki&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

[tq]

Reg. Number 17, Wikipedia is big in Eastern Europe. Why do you say Eastern Europe? Only Poland is an Eastern European Country, the oher ones are either central or Scandinavian or even not at all in Europe (Mexico??))

[DragonFlyEye]

Fascinating research! Thank you very much!

[DragonFlyEye]

Hey, has it occured to anyone that Google may be using Trends as an end-run around the Justice Department? It occurs to me that this is just the type of data that the JD was looking for when they demanded Google turn over it's search results data. This allows them to do exactly what the government wants them to do without violating our personal privacy. Good work, Google!

[Paul Fabretti]

If you link to me Steve, I'll do a blog on it!!!

[Anastasia]

Hi Steve. Your readers might be interested in Google Current, it's a segment we produce several times daily for broadcast and it lives online here. It's basically the news based on Google's Zeitgeist information about what people are searching for. Cool post!

- Anastasia

[Warren]

Steve....i thought you were a sports fan. Who searches for basketball? You might end up in some Euro league forum (no that there is anything wrong with that).
Change your search to (MLB, NBA, NFL, PGA, NHL) to find out the real deal...i.e. basketball is still huge :)

p.s. I'm Canadian "go hockey!"

[DeeM]

Any way I read it, I dont' see baseball surpassing hockey. Moreover, were these searches limited to the US market? Doubtful. Of course you get a push from hockey in Canada (what other sport do they care about? Curling?) and likely Europe. But to drawn any popularity conclusions is not looking at the data accurately. I mean, of course hockey might be more popular outside the US. Same goes for "football"
Try including soccer in your query.

[mrbene]

3) PR is starting to come close to catching advertising. AdAge still bests PR Week

Except that "Adage" is a real english word, which may be altering counts.

[carmen]

LOL, this is funny as hell. I'm mad (just an expression, not really mad) that David Hasselhoff is just now losing steam in Germany! LOL!

and of course PR is catching up to advertising... that's the way we like it -- way to go perception management!

[Paul Herring]

Are you serious about this? An interesting tool to be sure but from your post and some of the comments the conclusions that are being drawn aren't supported by the data. Just because something is searched more often in Google than something else doesn't mean it's "kicking but". It's a nice data point but conclusive?

[Alexander Rødseth]

Change "wikis" to "wiki" and you'll get very different results with number 19.

See?

19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis

[vmguy]

Wow. What I wasn't prepared for in these searches is the relative frequency among the cities of the world.

Beyond the US borders, they like Google ... they really like it :-)

[Bill]

I noticed a problem with one of your interpretations of the results of your sports query. Although 'football' is a head of baseball and hockey etc, If you check the regions for those searches the UK is number one. So this brings up the question are people searching for american football or soccer (European football)

[Tom Harrison]

Google may be bigger than God, but his/her stats go back to the epoch (you know, Jan 1, 1970).

[Stan Hansen]

John proved wrong.

[dgroup]

Here's a good reason there are more searches for Google than God. God is everywhere and easy to find. Google is buried in 2,210,000,000 results.

[David Cowhig]

I was wondering how it works in Chinese. I did a comparison of searches
on Mao, Deng, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao and Lei Feng (a legendary soldier who did selfless good deeds held up to Chinese students as a model):

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E6%AF%9B%E6%B3%BD%E4%
B8%9C%EF%BC%8C%E9%82%93%E5%B0%8F%E5%B9%B3%EF%BC%8C%E6%B1%9F%E6%B3%BD%E6%B0%91%EF%BC%8C%E8%83%A1%E9%94%A6%E6%B6%9B%EF%BC%8C%E9%9B%B7%E9%94%8B&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Every March Lei Feng beats them all. March is Lei Feng month. Overall,
Lei Feng came out on top thanks, to his high March peaks, in many
cities. Jiang Zemin peaked around the time of the Jiang Zemin - Hu
Jintao leadership handover.

Is the Korean War the Korean War or the Oppose America Help Korea War?
Opinions are evenly divided.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E6%8A%97%E7%BE%8E%E6%8F%
B4%E6%9C%9D%EF%BC%8C%E6%9C%9D%E9%B2%9C%E6%88%98%E4%BA%89&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Searches on Yu Jie, the Chinese writer who visited President Bush recently:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E4%BD%99%E6%9D%B0&ctab=0&
geo=all&date=all

Searches on Yu Jie peaked around the time of his arrest in December
2004, thereafter slowly declining. By late 2004, there was no longer
enough data to do a count. Was this the result of Yu Jie being placed on
the forbidden-to-publish new books in the mainland (although his already
published books are still being distributed) or could this have
something to do with the Chinese version of Google not searching on Yu
Jie (I recall reading that users in China are dispatched to their very
own customized Google now.)

Searches on US visa as you might expect, peaks in the Spring and early
Summer so perhaps students are doing the searches.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%E7%AD%BE%
E8%AF%81%EF%BC%8C+%E5%81%B7%E6%B8%A1%EF%BC%8C%E7%95%99%E5%AD%A6%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%EF%BC%8C%E7%95%99%E5%AD%A6%E5%8A%A0%E6%8B%BF%E5%A4%A7%EF%BC%8C%E7%95%99%E5%AD%A6%E8%8B%B1%E5%9B%BD&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

I added some other searches to this one -- additional items are go
abroad illegally, study in the USA, study in Canada and study in the UK.
There aren't enough searches on the last three to show up in the chart,
but bar graphs on top search cities do show that searches on study in
the UK was only slightly less than or about equal to searches on study
in the USA in several big cities.

Searches on places outside the China mainland -- USA, Japan, Taiwan,
and the UK revealed Japan to be the most popular search followed by
Taiwan and then the USA, even though a graph on web news article volume
put the USA somewhat ahead of Japan.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E7%BE%8E%E5%9B%BD%EF%BC%8C+%E6%97%A5%E6%9C
%AC%EF%BC%8C+%E5%8F%B0%E6%B9%BE%EF%BC%8C+%E8%8B%B1%E5%9B%BD&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

A search on Cultural Revolution, Mao, Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, and
Red Guard shows Mao in command, with a brief appearance of the Gang of
Four on the charts during the second half of 2005. Lin Biao is holding
steady at a fairly low level, while Mao showing his characteristic
volatility. Mao hit a minor uptick around his birthday (December 26) in
both 2004 and 2005.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=%E6%96%87%E9%9D%A9%EF%BC%8C+%E6%AF%9B%E6%B3%BD%E4%B8%9C%EF%BC%8C%
E5%9B%9B%E4%BA%BA%E5%B8%AE%EF%BC%8C+%E6%9E%97%E5%BD%AA%EF%BC%8C%E7%BA%A2%E5%8D%AB%E5%85%B5&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Google Trends is still in the testing stage and will likely become more
reliable and more interesting with more and a longer run of data. Still,
the searches that I have done do show readily explainable trends so it
looks like a another promising cyber tool. With so many Chinese on the
web, searching the aggregate search data could be fun.

As you can see, this could get addicting.

David Cowhig

[anjan]

In many of the conclusion author assumes google compares absolute searche volume for keywords. Its not, the indicator only shows that particular keyword is hottest in that city,country,language comapred to any other keyword searches city,country or langauge. Read more at

http://googletrends.wordpress.com/2006/05/13/google-trend-and-cities/

I have also used word, sex to further simplify the rules.

[SoftLord]

Also, sex is more popular than love. Big surprise there.

[idpt]

I though the result is somehow biased, especially when we consider it globally. The result is obviously based on the popularity of google. Consider those region, e.g. Japan, where Google had a rather low penetration rate (compared to Yahoo.)

[Joel Mackey]

I am compiling a massive list of random keywords compared and briefly discussed. It makes it easier to look at the Google Trends and will spark ideas in your own searches!

[Joel Mackey]

I apologzie for the double post but I wanted to post a link to the Google Trends Massive List.

Google Trends List

[Jorge Von]

But the Beatles are still bigger than God, huh?

[bullettime]

what a great tool google trends is. it really provides some interesting results!

[Shalmanese]

"19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis "

And the oft ignored forums dwarf all the others by far except in South America:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=blogs%2C+forums%2C+rss&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

[Clair]

Hmmm. This means I ought to check that one out! Didn't know about Google Trends until someone wrote about you pointing some interesting things on it.

[Mr Obvious]

Are you serious? Just because 1 website gets more searches does not mean it's more popular. Many MANY people use these things called BOOKMARKS or Direct URL's. Who in the right mind searches Digg? It takes longer to search than it does to type into the address bar.

[Mike Abundo]

Mr. Obvious: 85% of all 'Net traffic comes from search. 42.3% of those searches go through Google.