Fun with Google Trends
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Google Trends have been made available for quite some time, ever since its Beta version. There are localized versions available too, e.g. Google Trends for Singapore. You will be surprised on how these valuable information is made available for free, and such easily accessible!
** Do note that there is a quota limit each day, not sure about the number of queries limit, should be around 20? Anyway its a free tool, what’s more to ask?
On august 2008 Google launched Google Insights for Search, a more sophisticated and advanced service displaying search trends data. I am not going to talk about that in this post, maybe soon though as it seems interesting.
This is a casual post that I will walk through some of the keywords that I find interesting 
In case you wonder, the alphabet labels indicates the relevant happenings at that time, click on the graph to see more details on Google Trends.
I think everyone has to agree that Michael Jackson is the hit among all other subjects recently. The following graph shows that there is a sudden hike of almost 4x search volumn on keyword “MJ”
Wait. I think Michael Jackson has to be a more relevant keyword?
Right, the hike was even higher here, with almost 50x search volumn.
One gets most famous when they die, that’s obvious isn’t it?
Apart from that, we may also use Google Trends to trace the popularity of something.
Surprisingly, we are seeing the PHP trend going down, hmm..
I tried a few other server side scripting keywords, e.g. “ASP.NET”, “PERL”, “JSP”, “RUBY” and all of them shows a trend of either going down or stabilizes.I guess people just got bored with web programming? Or people simply got expert with the languages that they do not need as much reference now..
Next, I thought of another recent trend H1N1, and quickly query for the graph.
The result was no surprise, that the first relevant news was out on Dec 20 2008 and no searches before that.
So how about DSLR?
Looks like the trend is going up! Perhaps DSLR is getting more affordable by day, and more people are deceived by having a DSLR means they will take good photos, huh..
I did try out some keywords and they all turned out as what expected.
There is, however, an interesting trend on “wedding” keyword.
Looks like people lose interest on wedding by end of the year, and started to be interested in it again the next year. hah!
Go ahead and play with it. It is fun even for time killing, if you are not using it for research purposes
Last but not least, I typed in the keyword “adorr” out of curiousity..
And the outcome was like this.
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If i reverse engineer this post. You were actually searching for “Wedding”, then wanted to know if there are good times for people to get married, hence used trends. With the findings, you then thought of writing a post about your up coming wedding, but converted it into a tech post by keeping to the branding of your blog.
nickpan, i do admire how smart you are sometimes..
but not this time! LOL.. the fact is, i was thinking of blogging some techie stuffs and stumbled upon Google Trends which I came across quite some time back, and found it interesting to share with those who has not come across this before.. “wedding” was really just happen to be one of the keywords that came into my mind