Trends search

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 11 Jun 2008, 09:56

Google provides a way to look at trends in popularity/frequency of search terms. It is quite entertaining and informative to look at the trend line of the search term and which country, city and language the searches originate. http://www.google.com/trends . For example, if you want to look at the relative popularity of carnatic and hindustani music, type in carnatic, hindustani at http://www.google.com/trends and you will get a graph along with country, city and language breakdown.

( From Google site: Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that several approximations are used when computing these results. For more details see http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html )

For fun, enter ( one at a time ), bharathanatyam, kuthakali, kuchipudi, odissi and kathak and look at cities where the searches originated. It tracks quite closely to their approximate area of origin/popular practise.

vidya · Post by **vidya** » 11 Jun 2008, 19:46

Had tried this a while back and it changed my Carnatic-centric keyword view. That more people in Pakistan search for Veena, Or Indonesia tops
the search for Raga, or Uruguay for tala came as a revelation. As I suspected there is more volume for Tyagaraja and Hyderabad tops it and Bangalore searches more for Purandara Dasa whereas all spelling variations of dikshitar has no search volume(!)

rajeeram · Post by **rajeeram** » 11 Jun 2008, 20:12

vk, Thanks for the pointer. Quite interesting. Carnatic always alludes to music, but the word Hindustani is including its usage in movies and such:-) So probably using Hindustani music will result in a more accurate trend.

So many dueling possibilities!

uday_shankar · Post by **uday_shankar** » 11 Jun 2008, 20:31

One way to resolve ambiguities may be to go back to google search and tag the name of the country or city with a high hit rate for example search "Tala Uruguay" or "Veena Pakistan". Then you may find that:

1. Tala is the name of a place in the state of Jalisco in Mexico. Also, another place of the same name exists in Uruguay. The name is common throughout south and central America. It means "logging/axe/clearing/etc.." in Spanish. Hence the high hit rate in many south/central American countries and cities.

2. Veena in Pakistan pertains to some Pakistani actress named Veena Malik. Given that a large percentage of internet users in Pakistan (and other Islamic countries) are probably men, stupid young men at that, they're probably searching for pictures of their favorite actress or whatever.

I suspect even Tyagaraja in Hyderabad pertains to some silly local hero ?! For example I searched "Vedanta" and found that the greatest hit rate is in Bhubaneshwar. Not to put down Bhubaneshwar but it doesn't strike me as a place where large droves of internet users are looking for web resources on Vendantic studies ! And then it struck me that the mining company called Vedanta has started or is starting a university somewhere is Orissa named Vedanta University. Another example, "Panini" has a high hit rate in Switzerland and Italy and it probably has something to do with the sandwich. Practically nobody in the world is searching for the father of structured Sanskrit.

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 11 Jun 2008, 20:41

All good points Uday. That is the entertaining and informative aspects of looking at this. Rajee, I tried multiple words and in quotes, and the trends database seems to be only based on words and not phrases.

rshankar · Post by **rshankar** » 11 Jun 2008, 21:08

Uday - great demo of how even the best data querries from HUGE databases can result in GiGo (Garbabe in Garbage out) if every apect is not evaluated critically and understood totally (in isolation and in context)! Thanks for that.

I guess with many Indian words that we spell in English, there is a possibility that it can be pronounced very differently, leading to goofs like pANinI the gramarian versus panini bread!

vgvindan · Post by **vgvindan** » 11 Jun 2008, 21:23

I have experienced this - many a pornographic sites deliberately choose certain trendy words and add to their tags and, in all sincerety, when you visit the site, what you find is more than GIGO.

vidya · Post by **vidya** » 11 Jun 2008, 21:30

Uday,
Yup, Context is everything. Btw there is a multidisciplinary Vedanta university in Bhubaneshwar so it is vedantic studies in a sense. And mali is a bosnian city ! May be they should consider naming an actress Chitraveena

rajeeram · Post by **rajeeram** » 12 Jun 2008, 01:09

Uday, that right there is the strength and weakness of Google. A search on Hinduism results with Philippines as the top region and Farnborough, UK is the top city. Any clues?:-)

One of my friends taught her 6 year old to use Google whenever he is curious about something and click on the first result. Needless to say, there were a lot of unintended consequences where harmless queries on Lego toys and such brought about, let's just say, inappropriate results;-) Don't even get me started on the Adsense on GMail. When I opened an email with e-tickets, the Adsense on top screamed "Buy a brand new 747":-)

Vk,
I think using parentheses lets you search multi-word terms. From the FAQ on the site.

To see how many searches were done for either 'snow boots' or 'sneakers,' use parentheses around the multi-word term: (snow boots) | sneakers

vasanthakokilam · Post by **vasanthakokilam** » 12 Jun 2008, 06:14

Thanks rajee for that. I need to read that FAQ some more to see if they have further options to specify contexts.