Google Trends

I recently stumbled across a blog from You Tube that featured a trend analysis of the explosion of The Harlem Shake. Now, I will be the first to admit that I vehemently protest the Harlem Shake Videos, But I am also very intrigued by the shear explosion of the idea. I think that is shows a new emerging type of virility that we haven't seen on this level before.

 

We as a culture have seen many viral trends. Gagham style was all the rave just a couple months ago and is one of the few videos that has ever passed the 1 Billion view mark on You Tube. But the difference etween Gagham Style and The Harlem Shake vedio craze is the fact that people rushed out to make a video recreation of the Harlem Shake to post. This requires a large amount of logistics in this case spacifically because of the need for a large group of people filling the video's charectoristic style.

What I was really interested in was the way that You Tube was able to present the Harlem Shake trend data. It was very clear and descriptive but still in the style that You Tube is known for: White background, uncluttered, and simple. Here is an example looking at videos involving Cats, Dogs, and Goats:



I thought at first that this was an internal app of program that You Tube allowed its employees to use to track the company's interactions with users as You Tube is famous for trying to understand its users to monetize each unique interaction.

What I found after a little bit of searching was that they were actually using a Google tool that is open to the public. The tool just has an option that allows you to confine your search characteristics to You Tube. Below is the results of a little playing around with this tool, which is known as Google Trends.

The Big Data Explosion:

It can be a little hard to stand back and understand the relevance of a subject in its current form when you are taking a class on the subject. But, from the various blog posts here and from reading around the web, it seems that the industrial and non-industrial world is all a buzz about the term Big Data. So I decided that I would use Googlerends to see if there is any suport to the claims that Big Data is a booming industry.

I looked at the terms Big Data as well as the terms Data Mining and Data Visualization as a reference. The charts below show the information that the search yielded:

As you can see, there has been an explosion in the interest in Big Data for the last two years. One that does not seem to be stopping and could continue to increase. But at the same time, you might notice that the term Data Mining has seen a characteristic decrease in interest over the observable time from 2004 to the present. An only recently has the term Big Data taken the lead between the two. It should be noted that all the data presented in Trends is on the scale of 0 to 100 as a function of the scale f the data sets. I think this is a way that Google is trying to keep the privacy of its

Some of the other very interesting features of the Trend tool can also be seen. On the bottom left, you can see a global map that shows interest in each country. Everything below the line chart is based solely on just the search term that is selected, so when you are comparing multiple search terms, you can only see a single term at a time.With the click of a bottom, the map animated and scrolls through the data longitudinally based on half years. The colors show change based on the same 0 to 100 scale as seen in the laine graph.

Finally, on the bottom right, Google shows a list of similar search terms and there relation to the term that you are looking at. This allows you to see terms that have a high relationship and if you choose, you can add them to the line chart by selecting the add term button by the initial search term. You can see that I might want to add the terms The Big Data and maybe Big Data Analytics to my chart for a clearer picture.

Like I said earlier, you can filter the results to only You Tube video views, but you can also filter the results to: News, Images or Products. You can also narrow down to just a single country or region. And you can choose a single year or a specific date range within the available data range.