Will Anderson

XKCD recently ran a cartoon pointing out some humerus/frightening Google trends as well as where they are most popular. While I tend to doubt the veracity of some of them, it sparked my interest, so I did some trend sleuthing myself. My focus was holidays.

Not surprisingly almost every large holiday sees a spike around the date it occurs. Here are some of the ones I looked at (letters indicate related news articles. You can look on Google Trends to see what they are).

Christmas Search Trends

Easter Search Trends

New Years Trends

 As I said, this really isn’t all that surprising. There are a couple of interesting things to see here, like the fact that searches for Christmas have gone down over the years (decreased interest or fewer people who don’t know what Christmas is?). The really interesting stuff to me is where these searches originated.

Christmas Search Distribution

Easter Search Distribution

New Years Search Distribution

Lets take a look at this. Christmas has an approximately equal share between the UK, US, and Ireland (?!). Australia is fifth in the list. If you look at Easter and New Years though, Australia is ahead by quite a bit (and both times followed by New Zealand). This makes me wonder, is Christmas not as popular down under, or do not as many people do research about it as other holidays?

Now in keeping with the general topic of this site of late, I’ll show another trend… WordPress

WordPress Search Trends

WordPress Search Distribution

 First it’s cool to see that WordPress continues to grow in popularity. Second, I’m surprised to see that the first 6 countries here aren’t really in “The West”. Again I wonder whether these search statistics also reflect usage. If so, that says something interesting about WordPress’ demographic (kinda cool that it’s really spreading internationally). Of course I also wonder if splog activity has anything to do with these statistics.

So what do you think? Any of this surprise you?

See anything interesting here that I missed or find an interesting Google Trend you’d like to share? Let me know in the comments and I might add it here.