And if there's one thing we love, it's glimpsing at just how weird everyone else is. Which is the entire appeal of Google Trends right there: It's just a tiny bit voyeuristic. You already knew it's true, but it's mildly cool to see it in a graph, like you're peeking into odd human behaviors. Google even provides a few quirky-but-obvious examples of its own to get you started, such as posing "gyms" and "new years resolutions" side by side so you can see the exact same spike in interest in both right at the turn of the year.
Which is, of course, much of the defining appeal of the Internet itself. You can do side-by-side comparisons by typing in a string of words separated by a comma, and compare, say, Eva Longoria and Angelina Jolie and Jessica Alba and Lindsay Lohan, and find out that Angelina is huge in Turkey, Argentina and Portugal whereas Mexico City really, really loves itself some Lindsay, but that Jessica has made serious gains and is now racing to the top of almost all charts everywhere. (Update: Astute readers now remind me of the obvious. Or why "God" outpaces the "devil" by a margin of about 2-to-1 - except in Tampa, where the devil is, curiously, gaining quite a lot of ground. On the other hand, it's pretty clear why India, Pakistan and the Philippines are incredibly high on the basic sciences, including nukes (the U.S. One bit of historical news: Jesus has resurged and is once again more popular than the Beatles. You can speculate to your heart's content about why the hell Phoenix would be looking up "Jenna Jameson" more than Las Vegas, or why Nashville is so heavily into Christ, or why they really love Ashlee Simpson in Newark, N.J., or why Philadelphia, for some unknowable reason, loves the fact that Britney Spears is pregnant whereas Santiago, Chile, really, really loves Pearl Jam, but you could only guess. In fact, Google Trends is pretty much the biggest "go figure" tool you're likely to see all year. And "Viagra," for 2006? That's Fort Worth, Texas. "American Idol"? Honolulu, Hawaii - by a strangely huge margin. Who's looking up "impeach Bush" most actively? Portland, Oregon. Does this help explain why Rockville, Md., looks up "Vishnu" more than any other city? Verily, I have no idea.īut still, it can get interesting. Google, thoughtfully, also includes any relevant news articles it can dig up to go alongside your search results to perhaps explain some of the interest. What does this say about Elmhurst? What does this say about small towns across the United States? What do you think it says? Because that's pretty much what it says.
And also someplace I might need to get a summer home.
And also " vibrator." Do you sense a trend? I sense a trend. And also "porn." And also " gay porn" (just ahead of Las Vegas). Turns out Elmhurst is also, at least for 2006, the town most actively looking up "anal sex" (followed closely by Norfolk, Va., and, of course, San Antonio, Texas). Or at least the idea of sex (googling that hugely broad term returns a decidedly unsexy array of sites, including those for "Sex and the City," the Sex Pistols,, the National Sex Offender Registry and Sex Addicts Anonymous - not exactly a steaming cup o' hot titillation).īut that's not all. You know, just like religion.Įlmhurst, Illinois, is apparently way into sex. It is cool and useful and at the same time enormously frustrating due to its obvious limitations, though I imagine it will spawn enormous amounts of titillating filler for countless PR firms and marketers and research papers and news reports that cite all sorts of vague data that seems to tell you something really important but when you stop and think about it doesn't really tell you all that much at all. It is utterly fascinating, at least for a while. Isn't that cute? Isn't that interesting? Sort of? I know this because Google just unveiled this nifty and somewhat baffling tool called Google Trends, wherein you simply enter your search term and choose a couple of parameters and hit Return and boom, you can see which regions (or countries or cities) in the world are looking up that term most actively for a given year (the data also shifts day to day), using Google's massive search database, and it's random, semipractical stuff like this that makes it difficult to hate Google for whoring out to China and for becoming the new Microsoft and for their billionaire geek teenager CEOs.