Trends

Google has a really cool feature called Google Trends that analyzes Google searches.  The results from Christmas suggest that an unusually high number of people went to IHOP to celebrate and then used cheat codes for Guitar Hero/Rock Band. 

I tried it out with my own searches and found many expected patterns.  For example, the pattern of searches for “Rossignol” (a brand of skis) fluctuates similarly each year, with the most searches coming at the peak of the ski season:

Also around Christmastime, board games appear to double in popularity:

There are many similar seasonal patterns. Searches for “camping,” “kayak,” and “canoe” peak in the summer:

An emerging trend appears to be the popularity of kayaks over canoes, with kayaks pulling ahead each season. Of course we need to be cautious about jumping to conclusions based on these results (i.e. retailers might not want to make decisions based on them). This is certainly an interesting tool though, even if we can’t take the results too seriously.  

A final pattern I looked into is searches for textbooks. As expected, they peak at the beginning of the semester (January and August). There’s also a little blip in May, when some schools begin a May Term. The increase leading up to August sales is prolonged, beginning in June, which happens to be when many summer sessions start. 

Looking at the graph below, it appears that some students who search for “textbooks” get a head start on buying January’s textbooks in December. Those looking for “cheap textbooks” appear to be more likely to put off the task until January, although it is difficult to tell for sure because the volume of searches for “cheap textbooks” is so much lower than that of “textbooks.” 

The patterns that I found are not especially surprising, but there must be many interesting and unexpected relationships evident in our Google searches. Data mining in Google Trends would be a lot of fun! I hope someone does it and posts their findings. Until then, any thoughts on some cool trends to investigate? 

One final thought: I think it would be fun to apply these sorts of graphs to the trends Malcolm Gladwell describes in The Tipping Point.