I watch Google Trends from time to time, mainly to get ideas to blog about. And what I've been singularly impressed with is the vapidity of most of the top searches. The top searches at most times are almost always related to sports or entertainment celebrities. For example, at this moment the top ten searches are:
At best four of these have something to do with the real world, and that's generous as I'm counting Ashley Todd as "having something to do with the real world" even though it's pretty clear that Todd's connection to the real world is pretty tenuous. And really even the scleroderma activity is because a celebrity said something about it, not because of any real interest or news.
Still, three or four out of ten is better than average. There's been plenty of times that the hot list has been completely taken over by vapid celebrity nonsense.
Then again, this shouldn't be a suprise. Wikipedia demonstrates the same concentrations of interest, after all.
- "Isaiah Thomas" (sports figure, recently attempted suicide)
- "Bumetanide" (a diuretic which is in the news because some sports figures have been abusing it)
- "Chrissy Popadics" (a cheerleader at Boise State who was recently proposed to by a Boise State player during a post-game interview; the marriage is this weekend)
- "Ashley Todd" (a Republican campaigner who concocted a hoax in which she claimed to be assaulted by an Obama supporter)
- "Water pills", presumably connected with #2 above
- "Lychee", an Asian fruit which is apparently suffering a poor harvest for some reason
- "Hit a Jew Day", which I blogged about earlier
- "Waffle House Wedding", which I really can't make any sense out of, other than perhaps this YouTube video
- "Scleroderma", which is presumably in the news because actress Dana Delany just joined the board of the Scleroderma Research Foundation
- "Merl Saunders", recently deceased Grateful Dead keyboardist.
At best four of these have something to do with the real world, and that's generous as I'm counting Ashley Todd as "having something to do with the real world" even though it's pretty clear that Todd's connection to the real world is pretty tenuous. And really even the scleroderma activity is because a celebrity said something about it, not because of any real interest or news.
Still, three or four out of ten is better than average. There's been plenty of times that the hot list has been completely taken over by vapid celebrity nonsense.
Then again, this shouldn't be a suprise. Wikipedia demonstrates the same concentrations of interest, after all.
Eh. I don't share your gloom about the search traffic data.
ReplyDeleteThose may be the most popular terms, but what percentage of the public searched for them? (I don't believe Google discloses absolute values for that data).
Wikipedia, however, does. And what we find there is that the summation of the N most popular is dwarfed by everything else for many reasonable values of N.
So it's not that the world is only interested in popular sports stars and such. It's that the world has a multitude of interests, and that a narrow scope of simplistic things are the only things that most of us have in common. Sad, perhaps, but not the same thing as those topics being more interesting to people than everything else. (FWIW— I've searched for none of those)
Though I really wonder what you'd expect to find? You and I share many common interests and I doubt I'd find much of what you find very interesting to be completely uninteresting. Yet, if you compared our search terms you'd probably find very few near matches, and I doubt almost any exact matches.
The breadth of information available on Internet is just so enormous that two people with similar interests will still end up with very distinct random walks through the space of ideas.