e of the most upstanding websites for use and dissemination of information in this new age. However, not everything Google says can be proven to be true. Or is true.Google published "Zeitgeist" year-end statistics for 2006. It clearly states in black & white (well, green and black, anyway) that the "Top Search in 2006" are 1. bebo followed by 2. myspace. There are, of course, eight more, but lets focus on these two.
Google has another tool, called Google Trends. This is a pretty neat tool which allows a user to enter search terms and see how often they were searched for in a period of time. This tool has many shortcomings you can read about on their discussion board. Nevertheless, it still claims to have valid data.
When one enters the terms "sex, bebo, myspace" and views the results, it is clear that "myspace" was a more frequent search term in 2006 than "bebo", and that "sex" was searched for more than both of them.(Siobhan's Note: Does this surprise anyone?)
These two sets of data, both published by the same author - Google - claim to be correct but are in direct contradiction. I posted a question about this on the tool's discussion board, but no Google representative has stepped forward to address it. Perhaps, as one reader notes, "Googleology is Bad Science."
I await a definitive answer for the folks at Google, or anyone else with insight, for that matter.
7 comments:
Sorry to my non-technical readers, but this had to be digged.
wouldn't suprise me if Zeitgeist handles single word searches like "myspace", while Trends also includes multi-word search queryies such as "myspace jennifer"
I think it's more like a misunderstanding. Here's the explanation.
<< The Zeitgeist is "the spirit of time." This is why when we come up with the lists of top searches on Google.com for 2006, we do not simply retrieve the most frequently-searched terms for the period -- the truth is, they don't change that much from year to year. This list would be predominated by very generic searches, such as "ebay", "dictionary", "yellow pages," "games," "maps" -- and of course, a number of X-rated keywords. These are constants, and although unquestionably popular, we don't think they actually define the Zeitgeist.
Instead, we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 -- the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. >>
My cousin just graduated from Rice and got a job programming for Amazon. In one of his senior electives, the class basically hacked Google desktop. When the semester was over, the prof sent the results to Google. They basically wrote back, "Thanks. And any time one of these kids wants a job, call this number and we'll hire them immediately."
jonut alex chitu:
So you're saying that the Zeitgeist ratings should be interpreted as the amount of searches on "bebo" increased more from 2005-2006 than "myspace" ? The google trends search still disputes this claim, and I think it would be a worthless statistic anyway.
My question is did bkdm make sure he was wearing his tin-foil hat when researching this topic?
would someone who feels the urge to google 'myspace' even know what 'zeitgeist' means?
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