Moving at the Speed of Creativity by Wesley Fryer

Google Trends and Data Analysis

Google Trends provides a window into the search habits of the world. You can enter a search term and instead of seeing Google search results, you see an analysis of how frequently that term has been used in global searches. The global distribution of searches is also shown. This is an amazing tool, and I can think of a lot of research projects that students could do for school projects that would utilize “Google Trends” and its power. According to the website:

Google Trends aims to provide insights into broad search patterns. As a Google Labs product, it is still in the early stages of development. Also, it is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.

Just for grins, I did some searches for the names of my two favorite educational theorists, John Dewey and Paulo Freire. Here is the search for “john dewey” showing cities where people are searching for his name most on Google:

John Dewey: Cities searching

Another tab is available showing the countries where these searches are originating:

John Dewey: Countries searching

I wonder why so many more people are googling “John Dewey” in Puerto Rico?

Here is the city trend report for Brazilian pedagogical visionary Paulo Freire:

Paulo Freire: Cities searching

Recife is the city in Brazil where Freire grew up. Country results are:

Paulo Freire: Countries searching

The USA is not even on the top 10 list! More US educators, students, and other citizens/residents need to be searching for and reading about Freire and his ideas!

Popup menus let you refine your search trend results by region and date. You also can compare two different searches, as I have shown here for “john dewey, paulo freire”:

Searches for Dewey and Freire

Interesting that more Danish speakers seem to be searching for either Dewey or Freire than English speakers.

I can see the possibilities for data analysis here are really unlimited. Bounded only by the imagination and creativity of the user. Wouldn’t this be a fantastic tool to use in schools to help students analyze and understand data?

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6 responses to “Google Trends and Data Analysis”

  1. Doug Noon Avatar

    Oh great! Just what I need, another way to mess around with the internet looking at what other people are doing. You’re right about the possibilities it has for some kinds of research, and I can only wonder about what I might personally do with it.

    It appears that your link to Google Trends should not have the trailing slash, as that generates a 404 [The requested URL /trends/ was not found on this server.] error message.

    Gotta go play and see who is interested in…ahh…who cares? : )

  2. […] Google Trends and Data AnalysisGoogle Trends provides a window into the search habits of the world. You can enter a search term and instead of seeing Google search results, you see an analysis of how frequently that term has been used in global searches. … […]

  3. […] Google Trends and Data AnalysisGoogle Trends provides a window into the search habits of the world. You can enter a search term and instead of seeing Google search results, you see an analysis of how frequently that term has been used in global searches. … […]

  4. Wesley Fryer Avatar

    Thanks for the catch on the typo Doug, indeed the address DOES need to leave the slash off: http://www.google.com/trends.

  5. […] news Wesley Fryer comments on Google trends, another tool from the ‘do no evil’ masters of the webiverse. Google trends allows you to do a search and see how many times that search term has been entered and the global distribution of those searches. […]