And look what's getting more popular: Porn video sites, video sites, Facebook, Mac computers and how to work them -- particuarly how to take screenshots: this should be a tip-off to those of you working at Apple doing UX. ;)
Less popular as a Google search doesn't necessarily mean less popular, in some cases. For instance, I saw text messaging on your down trending list but that is obviously as popular as ever. People probably just don't feel the need to search it because it has become so ubiquitous.
That is true: this only measures current interest levels. A decrease in the current interest level of text messaging only means that people are not trying to find out about it as much.
However, why did it only start trending downwards in 2008? Text messaging was ubiquitous way before 2008.
In regards to the mac screenshots, I found the key combination a little too much for something I tend to do a lot. On my Win7 laptop I have OneNote and the screen capture with <win>+S was great. Now that I have Skitch, I find it way better because of the key combo and annotation features.
On Windows "Print Screen" and "Alt + Print Screen" also take screenshots of your entire screen, and of your currently focused app, then stick it in the clipboard for pasting elsewhere.
In epidemiology, this is known as syndromic surveillance, and it usually involves checking drugstores for purchases of cold medicines, doctor’s offices for diagnoses, and so forth. But because acquiring timely data can be difficult, syndromic surveillance has always worked better in theory than in practice. By looking at search queries, though, Google researchers were able to analyze data in near real time. Indeed, Flu Trends can point to a potential flu outbreak two weeks faster than the CDC’s conventional methods, with comparable accuracy.
"Google Correlate employs a novel approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithm over millions of candidate queries in an online search tree to produce results similar to the batch-based approach employed by Google Flu Trends but in a fraction of a second."
Ok, that is way too addicting to visit during work hours.
I drew a standard bell-curve peaking in 2007 and then trailing off to zero into 2011 and everything was either Myspace searches or Washington Mutual credit searches.
If you like the drawing interaction itself and want to re-use it elsewhere, there's a self-contained version at http://dygraphs.com/tests/drawing.html which also features a zoom and eraser tool.
Correlate is great, but the hand-drawn year-by-year search is really not all that useful - wither you have something in mind and prime your graph, or you get the obvious things.
Monthly correlations, however, would be tremendously useful. Every industry has its own calendar, conference season, and economic 'tides', and understanding these is a key marketing task.
Google is beginning to do things that I think are going to kick current market-research strategies off their feet. They have most of our lives being fed through their systems; they know what's going on in the world better than anyone.
And if you visit the parent page (http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/), you can search for a term and see it's graph, along with strongly correlated queries.
This can be an interesting way to identify hidden yearly trends too.
Drawing a zig zag with peaks (more sawtooth than sine wave) at beginnings of the years yields some interesting results and some things I've never even heard of like "slapped cheek syndrome" or fifth disease.
Apparently people are also extremely curious about the carbs in a grapefruit/orange at around the same time...
"Free Text Messaging" is an interesting 4 year period, though it looks like it's dead as a search term now. Is this because of Google Voice? Or did people give up on the idea?
Everybody has unlimited texting on their phones now so there's no need. There was a time when unlimited texting was rare and not all phones even had SMS, so it was popular to use various free web-to-SMS gateways if you were at a computer and your recipient may not be. I used AT&T's gateway in particular to message friends for a few years before I got an SMS phone. There were also shady ad-strewn "free texting" gateways, some acting as frontends to the official ones, some with a Turk behind the scenes, and even some that didn't work at all but just faked a texting interface to serve up ads.
Also, it is nice to see summer related results:
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:Rhcg3luEC...
Spider Vein, according to Wikipedia, may be caused by "environmental damage such as that caused by sun or cold exposure". And Asiatic Lily is a flower that grows on July.
It's not useless. It has real world academic use cases where researchers need data which might be related. It's also documented in the comic book of this service. Also this is a service becoming real because of a real world problem.
It's useful yes but the usefulness is derived from the data not people drawing lines on a screen! I don't think the drawing a line on a screen allows for much more data discovery .
Google Correlate as well as Trends are awesome. Why is google providing these data mining services for free to everyone? How are they making money from it?
Apart from just being able to search by drawing (cool concept in it of itself), the practical purpose would obviously be the reverse: looking at the graph of any search query. But obviously they will never release that :)
This would be infinitely more useful if it was backed by some actual data instead of those utterly useless search activity patterns. Why not combine a search like this with something like Wolfram Alpha?
What a waste...
edit: Seriously, wouldn't this be so much cooler if it gave us a new way to explore mathematical and scientific data?
If we could draw any curve and it would present us with matching constants, physical laws, mathematical proofs & theorems that have some correlation with the input data, chemical and biological data points, information from sociological studies, historical statistics...
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:deVob01-p...
And look what's getting more popular: Porn video sites, video sites, Facebook, Mac computers and how to work them -- particuarly how to take screenshots: this should be a tip-off to those of you working at Apple doing UX. ;)
http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:AbjtmD0iL...
Some of the stuff you would guess was becoming less or more popular but there is other stuff which is less obvious.
edit: This is super interesting: http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:SnghYCuBW...
Looks like Hacker News is gaining popularity exponentially, too. :)