Some interesting trends!
While writing my last post, I realized I needed to share something which many of you may not have been aware of: Google Trends are fun and informative.
It is wonderful to know, for example, that for all the charges of Fundamentalism and Religiosity dumped at the doorsteps of Islamic societies, the world's Top 10 Cities from where people search for God are
whereas the world's Top 10 Regions looking for Sex are
I suspect it means that the guys in the first instance have had enough of Sex and are looking for God ... and it's the opposite in the second case.
But even more interesting is the Top 10 Languages used in searching for Sex
Wonder what the Social Scientists and Psychologists make of all this!
Labels: Yooñhee
posted by Zakintosh at 11/25/2006 08:04:00 AM
15 Comments:
It's Buy Nothing Day ... so I ain't buyin' this!
25 November, 2006 08:42
Lol!!@Rayhan.
It seems the muslim/arab world suffers from frustrations aplenty (from all the hijabing going on perhaps)... but then again this could be a google-esque conspiracy to pervert the truth. ;) or perhaps a documentary is in order to further investigate these trends, called 'The Shroud of Puratin'.
25 November, 2006 16:28
When ever I see something like this, my bs filters go on high and I wonder why you got those results. First of all, what is the % of population with internet access with the cities googling God? That alone could explain why Portland, Seattle and Minnepolis made the list (they're not really considered part of the Bible belt in the US). The one I found most questionable is the langauge googling sex as I'm sure there are more googling in English than most of those other languages--how many words does English have for sex as compared to the other languages?
Thanks for the below post about beta blogger, I'll continue to hold off going with the new although they're constantly trying to get me to convert.
25 November, 2006 17:49
@Sage:
[1] Thanks for dropping by. The way cities are handled by Google may provide a clue.
[2] Although people outside Pakistan and India are reportng no problems, narrowing the glitch down to our 'blogger-ban bypass'methodology, I'd still suggest staying way from the shift until some of the other beta issues have been sorted out.
@others: If you blog from Pakistan, contact Faisal Khan (faisal@netxs.com.pk) for a solution he is offering. Although it involves money, it is a fairly affordable amount for some serious bloggers and has a lot of benefits,relieving one from tech hassles. No, he is not paying me a commission for promoting him (and I am pissed!)
25 November, 2006 18:51
lol! we had that discussion over at Karachi Metblogs sometime ago.
It appears that the rating is based on the Percentage of users googling a term vs to the total number of googlers from that particular classification. So even if there are 10 arabic users out of which 5 are googling for sex, the result is 50%, whereas when there are thousands of people googling from sex from say the US, vs the millions which use google, the percentage comes out to be quite less.
Also, users from pakistan (e.g.) are more aligned to using google than users from other countries where other search engines are alive and kicking for their patronage. In US, you have yahoo, AOL, google and MSN vying for the same crowd not to mention a thousands of smaller search engines.
In pakistan, we mostly use google, followed by yahoo or msn. Hardly anybody i know has ever looked up a term using AOL.
So the trends are skewed and not representative of the complete population (as said statistically).
26 November, 2006 01:04
hi
i dont understand the technical stuff but being settled in europe for the last couple of yrs i can somewhat agree wid the results.i think these westerns(my own term mayb:)r looking for something which they feel is absent around themselves,n same is the case wid ppl frm arab or other countries.man is curious by nature.
26 November, 2006 05:09
If the data for those searching for 'God' had also been in terms of countries, instead of cities, it might have been easier to compare and perhaps even correlate.
27 November, 2006 18:04
I am sure it was a tongue-in-cheek post by zakintosh.Why is everyone taking all this so seriously? But if the shoe fits ... (which reminds me, I have lots of unused ones lying around).
27 November, 2006 21:52
Don't know if it was a tongue in cheek post, if it was...well sorry, but i'll say this anyway :-)
I think we can relegate this one to the 'Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics' department. Having a degree in statistics and having proved lots of bullshit by numbers as a marketeer over my career, I can say fairly certainly that these numbers seem to be a case of not revealing the whole story, as numbers without context tend to do. And anyway, the numbers for Pakistan should have come down after I left and they haven't, hence proved!
The third chart is obviously erroneous as pointed out by mansoor (I tried writing it the way he writes his name, but couldn't find all the keys, sorry). The second chart too seems out of sync, somehow, it cannot be based on pure numbers as then India would beat Pakistan hands down, the chart has to be a percentage. And then what is or isn't included amongst the search terms considered sex would be the question. Wouldn't the search term 'boy' be considered a 'sex' search in Peshawar! The point being there's lots of data missing in this kind of an evaluation and should be taken with a pinch of namak.
28 November, 2006 22:04
shhhh, jawad. the hasba bill brigade keeps a tab on people who comment here. and many among them are pesha-wars ...
28 November, 2006 22:48
You should have given the search query 'Allah' a try instead of God.
02 December, 2006 01:29
@true life: With the FBI, CIA, & half the ISI trolling the internet, loking for people interested in Allah, it seems dangerous. They may have thought I was searching for 'recruits' - such is the paranoia they & I live with. And I am a firm believer in the statement that just because I'm paranoid, it doesn't mean they're not out to get me.
Also, who knows what Google will do with my searching habits data? Yahoo wouldn't even allow Mrs. Callahan to get an email address because the surname 'contained' that scary word. [The policy has changed since.]
02 December, 2006 08:34
I just wonder if Pakistan is at the top, why English is so low in the list. After all three of the top four don't speak Arabic for sure.
Regards.
05 December, 2006 14:36
cmon u r giving reference of google.
who runs google btw ??
think abt it
11 March, 2007 18:28
hi guys ... ever heard of tongue-in-cheek?
13 March, 2007 17:26
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