Does anyone understand Google Trends?

The top 5 "cities" are in the UK, but the top country on the Regions tab is South Africa - the UK is 5th - and the top language is Maltese.

How many Maltese speaking South African's are there in Milton Keynes?

This gives an interesting correlation:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=mars+bars&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

Cormac

See what you get when you type in 'wankers'.

This is getting scary...

Crap! No more sex in the U.S.! And here I was beginning to think that it was just me.

Looks like a list of ISP head-offices to me. Searches for "Football', "Mediaeval" and "The Register" reveal a significant overlap.

(What's with Eugene, Oregon, though? Curious minds wish to know.)

Try searching for 'The Register' instead. Apparently Eugene in Oregon is the world centre for El Reg. London comes a lowly fourth, and there's a shock entry at number 9 from Thames Ditton.

It now seems that the Chinese have made a mistake in their Panda breeding program. As we all know, Pandas are not the most prolific of breeders, but had the Chinese used Google Trends they would have discovered that by sending some of their Pandas to La Paz in Bolivia or Tijuana in Mexico they may have better results.

This is not as shocking as the amount of Trifle smoking that goes on in Kiev, Ukraine.

The biggest pricks are to be found in Dublin, with Milton Keynes comming second, and the worlds greatest concentration of twats reside in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Chavs it seems now have a new home in Norwich, UK.

I can't help wondering just how much use Tony Blair and co are making of Google Trends as most of the stuff that comes out of number 10 these days is as daft as the above, and don't tell Gordon about Trifle smoking, he will try to tax it!!!

Using the same research methods, St Albans, UK, is the world's centre for depression and boredom. By a long way.

Whatever problem was causing the good people of Brenford to be unhappy has probably been solved by Jim Pooley and John Omally, hence the sudden change.

Seems half the world's internet traffic goes through Bletchley. Is this coincidence then that the second world war eavesdropping and code breaking station at Bletchley Park is only just down the road? Tin Foil hats are the must have fashion accessory of 2007 as well now.

Fortunately we are only starting to feel the effects of when nostradamus ate my hamster, Jim and John are currently supping a quiet pint in the flying swan and hitlers time machine has been disposed of accordingly.

Brentford (the unofficial centre of the universe don't you know) has cheered up, as now Jim and John are back from their adventure they bought a round. Neville would tell you its a first, but he's only there part time.

Milton Keynes is full of wankers. It's official.

That's just because David Coulthard comes by sometimes to see how things are going at the Red Bull Racing factory...

Good, I'm moving to England then. The US has definitely not been so much fun.

If you search for "weapons of mass destruction", you can find them all in Australian cities! Why didn't those military morons think of that? ;-)

Oh, wait! If you search "WMD" then they are all in the US! By Latvian speaking people! I'm getting confused...

And why on Earth is Maltese frequently among the top languages!? There must be "a couple" of speakers of this in the world, sheesh...

Cheers

Who says that we have a problem with drugs in this country

http://www.google.com/trends?q=cheap+drugs&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all

about the US. If you search trends for pussy it's almost completely from the US, except for the #6 spot which is occupied by the Kiwi's.

If you click the 'normalize' link on the cities tab, it explains how they do the ranking.

I think they pick the top ten cities with the most searches for the term entered, then they rank those in order of percentage of total searches for each city.

So the city with the highest overall number of searches for a term might well be at number 7 or whatever. And even the city with the highest overall ratio of searches for a given term might not even be in the ranking at all (if it didn't have a top ten placing for searches on that term)

For instance, for eskimos at the North Pole, there's probably a high ratio of searches for the term 'penguin' to total searches. Up there, 99% of searches are probably for one of 'penguin', 'snow', or 'wankers'.

Type it into Google trends though, and just a load of Ozzie cities come up - even though only a maximum of half all searches from Oz could realistically contain that word. There's another surprise with Thames Ditton, which tops the rankings, but presumably because of all the concerned mums checking the nutritional value of their kids' snacks.

Thanks for the explanation, Paul. One thing, though. There are no penguins in the Arctic, and no Eskimos in the Antarctic. That might explain why Eskimos were searching for them, I suppose.

Interesting if you search on 'sex'.

No US representation & for Europe only Warsaw, Athens & Serbia-Montenegro squeeze in at the bottom of the Top 10!

I'm pretty sure this is a 'small-sample' effect of the 'normalisation' & Google carefully avoids telling us the sample numbers .......

"Lies, Damned Lies & Statistics" certainly applies here.

Normalised of London,

Nico M

Makes you wonder how they came across this survey or what search fields they was using....

Lets see:

Sex, UK top 10 locations?

Or something you can't search for in your lunch break ;)

Regards the earlier lonliness index, as you call it, this is very poor reporting. The countries that top the poll are all countries where people are most likely to travel, and would be most likely to search the keywords 'lonely' and 'planet'.

A child could figure this out.

Couple that with the blindingly obvious fact that people are unlikely to search for 'loneliness', bar maybe hermits, who might not want to try an overcrowded web then. Really, this is immature reporting. Whoops, sorry thought el Reg was a serious news site there for a second...

I'd like to refute all those comments about Bletchley being a national switching centre for BT, in reality MK is nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah with roundabouts within easy commuting distance of Euston. Between the V1 and the V12 and from the H1 to the H10 there are scenes that make Biblical Babylon look like a WI Bring and Buy Sale.

Every day hapless drivers are lured to this decadent wasteland of sin, filth, degredation and largely unaffordable housing. Blameless individuals innocently turn off the M1 and into the unfathomable labyrinth of twisty-turny cul-de-sacs - all alike. Sooner or later, bewildered and confused they arrive at the centre of Milton Keynes' suburbun vortex of evil - the shopping centre where they are doomed to spend their last pennies in the aseptic environments of Clare's Accessories and the dark heart of Middle England - John Lewis'.

Penniless and bewildered, these poor lost souls are cast out to walk MK's strangely wide confused clutching only a shop-soiled copy of the Argos catalogue and a 1978 Open University brochure. They wander until they come to the giant wicker cow* where they are doomed to dance until the end of time under the light of burning management consultants to the toe-tapping sound of Horizon FM.

* It took many years to realise that concrete cows don't burn nearly as well. Bad news for modern architects, but it would have helped Edward Woodward.