I had a hard time turning off my inner geek last week in church when the pastor opened up his sermon with a factoid about John 3:16 being the most popular search query on January 8th, 2009 when Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow wore the verse on his eye black at the BCS National Championship Game. Upon returning home, I thought I’d do a little fact checking, not that I expected the pastor to be lying or making things up, but because I could.
Google Trends, another product from Google Labs, allows you to see search queries over time and their popularity scaled to other search queries of that time. You can’t search with a colon (:) or brackets ([, ],{, and }) in the query, but searching for ‘John 3 16‘ did indeed reveal the truth that agreed with what my pastor had said. You can see the traffic of the search queries and how they compare to other searches on Google over time. January 8th and 9th, you can see a big spike in search queries for John 3:16. The graph is normalized and scaled to all traffic over the time period that you select. There are a few letters over landmark traffic patterns where news articles can be likely tied to those increases in traffic. Letter E, being over the beginning of 2009 links to an article with the headline ‘John 3:16 – Latest Bible Verse to Be Featured on Tim Tebow’s Eye Black‘.
You can narrow down the time frame and region that you select. You can also compare different queries by separating them with a comma. For example, if we search for ‘John 316’ and ‘John 3 16’ (notice the space) we’ll see that the query with the space is much more popular, but there is still an echo of the spike at the beginning of the year for ‘John 316’. In this search, I narrowed it down by region to the United States and in the last 12 months to give us a zoomed in context. We can interestingly see in sub-regions that Oklahoma and Florida, the home states of the two teams competing in the 2008 BCS bowl, had the highest traffic to query John 3:16 and Florida cities had the top 3 spots for the query as well.
You can also export the data that you generate as a .csv file to open in your favorite spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel. You are given the option of downloading the file as relative scaled data or as fixed scaled data. For more information on how the data is presented and normalized, you can read the About Page for Google Trends.
Using the comparison feature, we can also see what the spike in searches for ‘John 3 16’ really meant. For example, let’s compare search trends for ‘Tim Tebow’ and ‘John 3 16’ with this Google Trends search. With this query, we can see that Tim Tebow’s popularity easily shadows John 3:16 and the quarterback also had an increase in queries for the BCS bowl just as the bible verse did.
Google Trends is very interesting, but you might be wondering ‘What do I do with it?’ beyond the random interesting tidbits. Well, one example of its use would be something I would do if I had the opportunity to talk to Microsoft on the phone. From one of my most trafficked articles, Microsoft Word 2007 – This Modification is not Allowed Because the Selection is Locked, I would inform Microsoft that they need a much more informative error based on Google Trends and this search
combined with my own statistics. (Note the drop in August is when I uninstalled the stats tracking ability due to a performance hit it was putting on my server.)
Similarly, if given the chance to talk to Adobe, I would tell them that nobody likes Adobe Download Manager or GetPlus+ to download Adobe Reader or Flash. From my articles:
- GetPlus is a Big Minus
- Get Adobe Flash and Reader without GetPlus in Firefox
- Get Adobe Flash without the Adobe Download Manager for Internet Explorer
You can see this Trend for yourself with this Google Trends query.
This might add validity to my opinion that Mozilla should throw their weight into the matter and recommend Adobe stop using GetPlus for the reasons I highlighted in the article, Is Mozilla shooting itself in the foot with Its Smart WebPages?. You can see a direct correlation to early September when Mozilla released Firefox 3.5.3 and they started checking the version of Flash on first startup.
Some other cool things you might find of interest with Google Trends is their Hot Trends. This will tell you real time what the most popular queries are. Going back to our original example of Tim Tebow’s bible verse, you can see John 3:16 was the #1 search on Google January 8th through the Hot Trends view.
Hot Trends also comes with an iGoogle gadget that you can install on your iGoogle page to keep up to date with all the hottest happenings around the web.
From today, we can see that Tiger Woods confession to an affair has perplexed many people as to the definition of ‘transgressions’, making it the number one search for today. Transgressions, from Merriam-Webster, means:
an act, process, or instance of transgressing: as a : infringement or violation of a law, command, or duty b : the spread of the sea over land areas and the consequent unconformable deposit of sediments on older rocks
By the way, John 3:16 states:
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. – John 3:16
Let me hear you in the forums if you find any other fascinating anomalies with Google Trends.