Mucking around on the net the other day and visited Google Trends. It is a tool that generates graphs of where, when, and how many searches for specific words and phrases happen through the Google search engine and how many times said search item appeared in the news. The tool also ranks the search item among countries, cities, and languages based on a normalized function that Google uses to count each search.

Anyone could go on about the historical importance of this tool and the data it has already collected, but perhaps everyone (that is me, you and the other person reading this blog) is thinking the same thing: Foucault, eat your heart out.

On to the fun.

Search #1 - The Tour de France.

Let’s run a test on a fairly specific topic to test this out: ‘The Tour de France.’ The spikes of searches for the annual event do seem to show that the tool actually works.

Search #2 - Cuisine.

Lets try ‘cuisine.’ France down the board, as expected.

Search #3 - Happiness.

The glass seems to be more half-full every quarter.

Search #4 - Climate Change.

This is where the concept of historical discourse theory can actually benefit. Looking at this graph one could surmise that the concept of climate change was working its way into the social conscience from mid-2006 onward.

Search #5 - God.

Here’s a interesting one. Looking at the news graph it appears God’s PR department has been working overtime.

Search #6 - Love.

Philippines places at the top of the country-ranked list for ‘love’ searches, and Canada — surprisingly? — is number three.

The question that still hangs between my entertaining searches: Those that search Google for happiness, God, or love: were they looking for happiness, God, or love, or had they already found it?

Better yet, the real question should be, who was happy about winning the yellow jersey while looking for God when eating French cuisine and thinking about climate change?

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Posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 3:59 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.