Posted by Niv Efron and Eyal Molad,
Google Trends Engineers, Tel-Aviv
A lot of us love video games, and everyone here has their favorite
from the latest generation of consoles. We have a game room in our
building that happens to have all three of the latest systems:
Artem loves Microsoft's Xbox 360, Niv can't part with
Sony's Playstation 3, and Corey is hopelessly addicted to the
Nintendo Wii. After some serious work organizing the world's
information, we like to kick back with a round of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wii_Sports" id="l6v5"
>Wii Tennis or a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioshock" id="nfh7"
>trip to Rapture. The problem is that
there's only one TV in the game room, and of course only one
system can be played at a time. In true Googley fashion, we look to
data to decide which console gets first dibs. For that, we used
href="http://trends.google.com/" id="xco2"
>Google Trends, which lets us see what the
world is searching for.
Take, for example, a
href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=xbox360 | (xbox 360), (playstation 3) | ps3, wii&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0"
id="hr_e" >comparison across the
systems:
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href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/RvUfk8I_8DI/AAAAAAAAAR0/LLgAbiICq2Y/s1600-h/TRENDSchart1.jpg" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5113027671428689970"
border="0" />
Looks like a pretty tight race. Let's take a closer look at
href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=xbox360 | (xbox 360), (playstation 3) | ps3, wii&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2007&sort=0"
id="pvor" >2007.
onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"
href="http://bp3.blogger.com/_Ap14FtNN91w/RvUftcI_8EI/AAAAAAAAAR8/gj2XBNK7o_8/s1600-h/TRENDSchart2.jpg" >
alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5113027817457578050"
border="0" />
Wow, they're definitely neck and neck (and neck) — the top
console could change anytime. Fortunately, Google Trends is now
updated every day with the latest information. (Until now, Trends
was only updated once a month.) Now we can follow the console race
(or any other topic) every 24 hours, whether it's
href="http://www.google.com/trends?q=the office, heroes&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0"
id="f0lv" >The Office vs
Heroes or the candidates for the
href="http://blog.njection.com/blogs/blog/archive/2007/09/08/can-google-trends-predict-the-2008-election.aspx"
id="s368" >next
presidential election.
In addition to daily updates, we've also created an iGoogle
gadget and a
id="n:dq" >feed for Hot Trends. If you have ever
wanted to know what the Internet was thinking right now, Hot Trends
can tell you just that. Hot Trends shows you what the fastest
rising search queries are on Google. Now you can keep track of Hot
Trends three ways: by visiting the site,
href="http://www.google.com/ig/adde?moduleurl=http://www.google.com/ig/modules/hottrends.xml"
id="za3y" >adding the
gadget to your homepage, or subscribing to the feed by adding
the
id="hhc2" >feed URL to
href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends/atom/hourly"
id="mznj" >Google Reader or your favorite
feed reader.
We'd love to hear about any interesting trends you've discovered. Please send
them to us at
>cooltrends@google.com. We'll
feature the best ones in a future post.
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Tags: , Efron, Eyal, google, Molad, Niv, Posted, trends
