Google trending the webosphere – comparison of volume of “Paris Hilton” vs “Britney Spears” vs “Climate Change” searches.
…Which is kind of sad really. Here is what it looks like. The axes imply relative number of searches since it doesn’t seem like you get hard numbers on this (from Google Trends).
What’s kind of interesting is that you can kind of see (for Britney and Paris, anyway) where the major news events occurred. In Britney’s case, there are two large peeks which actually correspond to her head shaving and some bad performance at an awards show. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out what the Paris peaks are, but I would guess it has something to do with her going to jail.
At this scale, it doesn’t seem like you can pick up hose sorts of trends on the term “climate change.”
If we do expand the scale so that you can see the peaks for climate change, this is what you get:
It would be interesting to see if web interest is maybe dictated by seasonal events (like certain weather examples). I do note, however, that the announcement of Al Gore and IPCC getting the Nobel Peace Prize (Oct) didn’t seem to do much here. On the other hand, February was when the Working Group I of the IPCC released their science report (the one that really emphasized anthropogenic effects) – although from the graph, it looks like something happening in January sort of set things off.
