Investigating sine waves in Google Trends

by emmett • 17 years ago

29 15 17 years ago

gojomo• 17 years ago

Cold and flu season: head congestion, medications which may affect the ears.

To test weather-based theories: compare northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere search trends. (Unfortunately, there's not enough search traffic on [ringing ears] in southern-hemisphere english-speaking regions to be sure... though the thin Australia data is vaguely consistent with the idea their highest traffic is mid-year.)

peregrine• 17 years ago

Whenever I get bad sinus/ear infections during winter my ears ring.The ears/face are very closely related and a simple cold/flu can spark an infection.

aristus2• 17 years ago

Another interesting one is pi: http://www.google.com/trends?q=pi

Ignore the spike near 14 March and look at the log low dip in summer and the sharp upslope in August-September.

Other very seasonal queries: http://www.google.com/trends?q=mushrooms

Also, for some reason, "DYI", "pi", and "horses" all had large spikes around the end of 2007. Anyone want to guess why? Data gremlins?

http://www.google.com/trends?q=diy%2Cpi http://www.google.com/trends?q=horses%2Cdyi%2Cpi

chengmi2• 17 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised if the "pi" trend correlates well with vacation times in academia.

aristus2• 17 years ago

Sure, but are school curricula really that well coordinated across the english-speaking world? I'm kind of surprised that the graphs match so well:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=natural+logarithm%2Cbase+10%2...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=hamlet%2Csocrates%2Ctruman

robotrout• 17 years ago

Fun stuff! Yes, it seems to correlate to "runny nose" http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=runny%20nose%2Cring...

... and in Australia, both seem to peak in the July time period, as expected. http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=runny%20nose%2Cring...

neilk2• 17 years ago

I looked up the causes of tinnitus to see if they were cyclical too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinnitus#Causes_of_subjective_t...

"Ear infection" has a similar pattern. Although there I'm baffled by the huge spike exactly at Christmas followed by nothing in January.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=ear+infection&ctab=0&...

Tinnitus is sometimes caused by depression. Depression can be seasonal, and there's another vaguely cyclical graph that follows the seasons of the Northern Hemisphere. Spiking in the months after Christmas (bills) and another big one in late spring / early summer (student exams?) and then the onset of winter. There's a big reduction over the summer, and interestingly, a negative spike right at Christmas. Lately, there might be some confounding searches for economic depression -- at least that's how I interpret the latter half of 2008.

http://www.google.com/trends?q=depression&ctab=0&geo...

pygy4• 17 years ago

Stress and depression are also strongly correlated with religion, but less so with God or prayer. There's a drop in the searches for religion around christmas...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=religion,+stress,+depression&...

Notice also the spike in stress and depression searches around Romney's speech on religion, we'll come to that later on.

It's even more interesting if you look at it region per region.

* US: http://www.google.com/trends?q=stress,+depression,+religion,...

* UK: http://www.google.com/trends?q=stress,+depression,+religion,...

* Australia: http://www.google.com/trends?q=stress,+depression,+religion,...

There are different patterns in all three regions, but the correlation holds. I took shoulder as a neutral term, to be sure the variations were not related to some global trend in search volume.

Surpisingly, though, the Romney speech spike is bigger in worldwide queries than in US specific ones.

At the world scale, the spike is also very correlated with feet, flower and shoulder...

It's not the case in the US... And the Romney spike is much smaller when compared to the average frequency of each term.

* World: http://www.google.com/trends?q=religion,+feet,+flower,+shoul...

* US: http://www.google.com/trends?q=religion,+feet,+flower,+shoul...

Do you have any idea of what happened worldwide in November 2007? Is it a Google bug? Or was there an overall spike in search queries at that point?

neilk2• 17 years ago

Ok, double weirdness. Earlier I was seeing spikes in late 2007 for almost any query.

At first I thought it was confirming my theory because that's when the housing bubble was really popping. But it was also there for control words, including "the". So I reported a bug in their forum.

But now that's all gone. Either that was speedy corrective action or a transient problem.

ralph• 17 years ago

"job search": http://www.google.com/trends?q=job+search&ctab=0&geo...

Interesting dip come December and then a spurt that more than makes up for it in January. New year, new job?

Investigating sine waves in Google Trends

Related Stories