May 11, 2006
TIme for a New Game? Google Trend Match
Today Google announced four new services (though one of them - the Google Notebook, a web clipping, note sharing tool - isn't available yet).
Another is 'old hat' - the Google Desktop, although it does come with Google gadgets (beating Microsoft to the desktop with that name - Microsoft gadgets won't be coming to the desktop until Vista is released, I believe). It'll be interesting to see if the Google Gadgets differ from Yahoo/Konfabulator widgets to any significant degree.
The third -Google Coop I don;t grok at all yet, and need to think about a bit...
And the fourth? Google Trends, a tool for showing a sample of "how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time".
Along with Google Zeitgeist this looks like it may be interesting for our new course on info skills - Beoyond Google: Working WIth Information Online.
Here are a couple of screenshots to give you a flavour of what the service offers:
- firstly, a search on the term 'blair ' - notice how some peaks are correlated with particular stories. It'll be interesting to see how the filters that deliver these annotations are tuned over time:
- secondly, a comparison chart between two terms (you can actually compare up to five):
I really hope this becomes the basis of a game to rival Googlewhacking - GoogleLike - where you have to find two or more apparently independent terms that are either correlated or anti-correlated. (so we need a correlation rank score for the traces...any chance of the Lazyweb coming up with a Greasemonkey script to do this?;-)
And finally, an example of how the traces can be used to demonstrate the emergence of a whole new area of interest (Library 2.0 in this case) out of nowhere:
Next stop: perhaps I ought to find out what the blog stats people offer?
Posted by ajh59 at May 11, 2006 02:25 AM