Google has released their “2005 year-end Zeitgeist”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005.html, a breakdown of the most searched keywords this year. The “World Affairs”:http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist2005/worldaffairs.html statistics plot out search queries over time of some select news items. The comparison between online news sources (CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera) is revealing.
About Younghusband
Sir Francis Edward Younghusband (1863-1942) was a British explorer, army officer, military-political officer, and foreign correspondent born in India who led expeditions into Manchuria, Kashgar, and
Tibet. He three times tried and failed to scale Mt. Everest and journeyed from China to India, crossing the Gobi desert and the Mustagh Pass (alt. c.19,000 ft/5,791 m) of the Karakoram mountain range in modern day Pakistan. Convinced of Russian designs on British interests in India, Younghusband proactively engaged in the nineteenth century spying and conflict over Central Asia between the British and the Russians known as the Great Game.
"Younghusband" is a Canadian who has spent a number of years bouncing back and forth between his home country and Japan. Fluent in Japanese and English with experience in numerous other languages from Spanish to Georgian, Younghusband has travelled throughout Asia. He graduated with an MA from the War Studies Department at the
Royal Military College of Canada, where he focussed on the Japanese oil industry and energy security issues. He has recently returned to Canada from Japan, and is working in the technology sector.
I’m not sure what they’re plotting there. I doubt that Google has access to traffic data for each of those sites. I imagine they’re plotting the number of visits to those sites which came from a Google search result. In this case it might just mean that a news site’s PageRank determines its placement in the search listing for a news-related query, ignoring the case where searches are tweaked for specific queries and/or at specific times.
If it plots visits, I imagine that Al Jazeera and BBC switch places if you compare data from only the Middle East. (And similarly, you get a lot fewer Al Jazeera hits for citizens of the UK)
Google Zeitgeist graphs promise a lot, and spark a few ideas and scenarios, but when “push comes to shove” the lack of details (at least axis labels) mean that we can’t go beyond speculations.
P.S. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!
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Gabriel, my guess is that the graphs plot searches. And I too would like to see some indication of scale in them.
Showing off my elitism, and presuming that these graphs are restricted to the United States or North America at most, I wonder what it says for the health of the Republic that under the Google News category, not only were Katrina and the tsunami the only “real” news items, but that Janet Jackson topped the chart.
As a company that tries to do no evil, we were quite pleased to see that [the force] outdraws [the dark side] in search queries.
heh
It’s great to see how Wikipedia is growing and growing and growing…