Thursday, May 11, 2006

Google Trends

Google offers you a new gadget to play with:

It allows you to see how the intensity of searching for various queries depends on time, where the searchers for particular queries are concentrated, and how various articles in the news affected the rates.

For example, you can search for famous blogs such as

Well, sorry, it does not work. Not enough results. OK, what else can I do than to give you a real example. :-(

You can also try to search for Woit. Well, again, reality forces me to switch to a real example. If you search for the last name of your humble correspondent, Google will try to convince you that the searchers are concentrated in

  • Princeton, NJ
  • Stanford, CA
  • Cambridge, MA
  • Prague, Czechia
  • Amsterdam, NL
  • Montreal, Canada
  • New York, NY
  • Toronto, Canada

Realistic. Analogously, string theory is concentrated in

  • Delhi, Mumbai, Seattle, Austin, L.A., San Francisco, San Diego,, Denver, Boston Philadelphia

Again, unfortunately, loop quantum gravity does not offer enough results to make any conclusions. Send complaints to Google if you have any.

Even more interestingly, you can separate several queries by commas and compare: