We build private clouds. Specifically for law enforcement.

I know I’m supposed to be on vacation… and I am. I’ve been watching a lot of cable tv, which I don’t usually do. And I’ve not been able to resist the temptation of occasionally checking in to see how my precious Google Trends are doing. Having watched the better part of two Highlander the series episodes as part of yet another bloated holiday tv marathon, I noticed that there are some heavy HL references in the USA top 100, including numbers 13 and 55.

So I thought of a simple test to check for the origins of popular trends on Google. It’s outside of my technical knowledge - not to mention that I’m still on vacation - so I thought I would post it here as an open challenge/invitation for anyone who is interested in tracking down the epidemiology of Google trends.

The idea is dead simple: write a script which combs television listings for titles, actors and keywords on any given day. Correlate that info to Google Top 100 Trends USA, and see what your percentage of matches are. Look for trends.

My guess is that you’ll see quite a striking set of matches, and the theory explaining it is simple: people watching a lot of television look up the things they have seen when they go to their computers.

I’d be curious to look at if cable television yields higher search trends than network television. I wonder if you could even get some kind of read on how many people in the USA are watching what channel, based on the search trends yielded. I’d also like to look at listings of advertisements played on television channels, along with number of times aired and see where that lands you.

The broader question, of which this investigation is merely a subset is - of course - where do search trends come from? Can you trace it back to television stations, to advertisements, to specific media outlets, to PR companies, corporations, manufacturers, to word-of-mouth viral transmission from user to user? What technologies would you need to measure these trends, their origins and patterns of transmission - or at least make educated estimates on the raw data? What companies are providing these services? To corporate clients? To governments? To the public?


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This entry was written by enjoying autumn, posted on December 26, 2008 at 10:29 pm.

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5 Comments

  1. Julia
    Posted December 26, 2008 at 11:03 pm | Permalink

    Queen did the theme song for the original Highlander movie.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BMP-H2ydJk

  2. Julia
    Posted December 27, 2008 at 6:22 pm | Permalink

    The description of the Tokolke, on page 2, might be the thing that was biting your leg. This is a great interview with Credo Mutwa. He hasn’t lied to me yet.

    http://www.metatech.org/credo_mutwa.html

  3. Ted Heistman
    Posted December 27, 2008 at 7:56 pm | Permalink

    The broader question, of which this investigation is merely a subset is - of course - where do search trends come from? Can you trace it back to television stations, to advertisements, to specific media outlets, to PR companies, corporations, manufacturers, to word-of-mouth viral transmission from user to user? What technologies would you need to measure these trends, their origins and patterns of transmission - or at least make educated estimates on the raw data? What companies are providing these services? To corporate clients? To governments? To the public?

    I think you are on the tight track with this but you are going the wrong way. So that’s good.

    The first question with the relation between google searches and tv programming is about collecting the drool from a mass of pavlovian dogs and weighing it and asking what it means.

    It doesn’t mean anything.

    Measuring the drool might be a good thing to do because then you will know what to eliminate as not important.

    Its the anomalies you want. Certian people are more like lightening rods, than conditioned subjects.

    You doing a google search on a weird dream you had is more in line with where ideas come from than someone typing in the name of a contestant on American Idol.

    Find a way to studdy the google searches of people that are like “mavens” or something.

  4. Ted Heistman
    Posted December 27, 2008 at 9:56 pm | Permalink

    Are you really looking for this:

    Prima materia

    And trying to see how this enters cyberspace?

    Am I following you? Or no?

    My sense is that the Universe runs on this stuff, prima materia, and that the internet is more sensitive to measuring this, being such a subtle, quick, socially connected medium.

    But there is a certian amount of reverberation and things reflecting back on themselves.

    But what I think is that there is a noosphere and a collective unconscious out there, and certian people tune into it and are “inspired” to bring it into existence.

    This isn’t everyone all the time, its certian people at certain times, that channel ideas.

    A lot of what goes on are people just reacting to things or responding to conditioning.

  5. #USR04
    Posted December 28, 2008 at 7:48 pm | Permalink

    Yeah, you’re right all around Ted. Prima materia and the sort of base “coding language” which brings forms into existence out of the Divine Substrata…

    And now that I’m back in Baltimore, it’s off to the pub. More later tonight perhaps.

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