About a year ago I found out about Google Trends service. Google Trends shows a plot of volume of searches on Google a term over a period of three years. The chart has two areas. Above the time line is search volume for the term. Below the time line is how often the term appears in the news sources at that time.

Google Trends allows to see a color-coded chart for up to five terms at a time. The higher is volume of searcher for a term, the higher its curve will appear on the chart.

The chart below is a screen shot of a request for terms “Good” and “Bad”.

This chart tells us that people are looking for the word “good” more often then the term “bad”. I think that shows that people are more interested in good than in bad. This is a good news I suppose. And it is somewhat expected. It also appears that changes in volume of searches for the “good” and changes in the search volume for the “bad” follow each other almost exactly. This is very interesting! It means that all Google users as a whole change their interest in “good” and “bad” in a very similar way!

This apparent correlation surprised me and I started to play with terms.

Yes, Google users prefer to search for “Mother” more than for “Father” and volume of searches for them changes without as much correlation.

Look how closely curve for the “dark” follows the curve for “angel”. Striking…. From begining of 2005 these two curves behave almost identical. Why would it be? My initial thought that people are looking for a phrase “Dark Angel” a lot. This would explain correlation in the search terms.

This plot shows combination of three search terms “Angel”, “Dark”, and both words in appearing together in the same search . Look at the yellow curve. It lays flat on the botom of the chart. This contradicts my intuition. People do not look for a phrase “Dark Angel” nearly as much as they look for them separately. And there is no correlation on the volume changes. Why would it be?

Look at these charts - no surprises here:

Rumor mill is still spinning around Google buying dark fiber all over United States. What big G has in mind? May be it plans to create own Internet backbone? May be it is going to enter into telecommunication market? I dare to guess what is behind of this process. Read the rest of this entry »