Ninth Stage

Google Trends is a cool new tool to get a history of search term’s popularity and even a list of cities where the term was most popular. Let’s try it out.

I did a search for “NSA” and Google Trends returned this graph:

There are actually two graphs here. The top one is the relative level of Google searches for “NSA”. The lower graph is the relative occurance of the term “NSA” in news stories. I’m not that interested in where the term was most popular but it’s not surprising that Baltimore, Washington and Reston are in the top five cities.

Along the top you can see labels for datum points. The full search result page has a legend for a news stories at that time. For example, the [D] reference is a news story from 26 January this year with the headline “Bush Defends NSA Terror Spying Program”

An input of “AR-15″ returns a simpler graph without any reference to occurrences in news stories, not popular enough I guess.

But what’s that big spike in searches?

Following a hunch, I tried a combo search, search terms separated by a comma. Here’s what I got for “AR-15, Assault Weapon”:

The blue line is for AR-15 and the red one is for Assault Weapon. I was right. The big peak, labeled [C], has the news feature “Assault weapon ban ends” as it’s story. Interestingly AR-15 has historically been a more popular search term even without the assistance of news stories. I guess the AR-15 searches with no corresponding news stories must have reflected a pent up demand for AR-15s. I hope so anyway, AR-15s are good for the nation.