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Tapping into the world’s psyche and learning about the world’s interest, collective consciousness, and thoughts can be seen on Google Trends. Below are some of thie things I’ve learned (not in any rational order):
- Barney is bigger than Steve Jobs, Oprah is bigger than Barney, & God is bigger than them all.
- The US Army is bigger than the Navy, Marines, and Air Force and Texas Loves them all.
- Java is more popular than C++, Perl, Ruby, and Cold Fusion (though “java” could mean the coffee bean).
- Argentina loves Pepsi and apparently nobody cares about Mountain Dew.
- Anorexia is bigger than Bulimia & Obesity and it looks like eating disorders is a much bigger problem outside the US.
- The Beastie Boys continues to be bigger than Run DMC and both are very popular in Australia.
- Geneology is much bigger in New Zealand than it is in the US.
- Six Sigma is more popular than Lean Manufacturing and both are huge in India and rapidly declining in the US.
- Yahoo is bigger than Google; Google is bigger than MySpace; MySpace is bigger than AOL.
- David Letterman and Jay Leno are going head-to-head.
- Dogs are more popular than cats and both are huge in New Zealand (I wonder if there’s a connection with #7 above?).
- Christmas is bigger than Hanukkah.
- Blogs have caught up with Newspapers.
Much more can be learned; From an aggregate point of view, this is a marketing researcher’s dream. It’ll be a great feature to localize trend searches to a zip code. That would be the holy grail of advertising.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Very cool trends. Now, you know that some of the searches are naturally flawed. Take Java, C++, etc. Java is a country so searches for that count for it. The Army could also be the Salvation Army which would skew the data. Also, don’t forget that Mountain Dew is owned by Pepsico so you could be double dipping!
james
“newspapers, blogs” gives different result than “blog, newspaper” – so it’s all in how you pose the question