Chances are, if you’re the type of person who likes to be informed — which characterizes just about all of us who use search engines with any regularity — than the less you know about something going on in the world around you, the more likely you are to fire up your go-to informational resource… and start demanding some answers.
Back in August, two-time Republican Presidential candidate John McCain jolted the country out of a sleepy summer daze with his announcement of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Most of America collectively blurted out, “Who?!?!” And many went to Google to find out more.
According to its proud creator, Google Trends is a tool from Google Labs that shows the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now. It has evolved over time to depict these terms in a visually-friendly format which allows the user to spot correlations and make an educated guess or two about their meaning. As of today’s writing, a Nov. 5th story that ran in the Intellectual Conservative entitled “Sarah Palin 2012″ reminded the electorate of a potential future run at the White House, and fired up enough people to give her another little boost (that’s the “F” flag in the graph above). Sometimes these change over time, but you can see what the full dashboard looks like for the whole timeline. Note the interesting trend since Election Day: news volume down sharply, while search volume still showing signs of life. Looks like the news media may have forgotten her, but her fans have not.
This is no passive trend, either. Last October, southern California fell prey to its usual deluge of wildfires. The Orange County Register plotted major fires on a Google map, serving both for public awareness of the hazard, as well as helping them to mobilize fire-fighting resources where they were most needed. Search Engine Land picked up on a bunch of other area organizations doing the same thing.
Why is all this important? Think about the role search engines are playing in our society:
- Virtually everyone on the internet uses a search engine with regularity.
- The range of behaviors modeled in search engines is becoming more diverse.
- Search engines, and other digital media, are awakening the general public to the limitations of traditional media. (The Virginia Tech massacre of 2007 comes to mind.)
In other words, it’s not just all about business. It’s not about the ads on the right hand side of Google, or the popups in Facebook, or the email spam offering Free Shipping for the holidays. All this technophilia goes to prosocial applications as well.
And while you’re thinking about that… consider this. Earlier this week, on their official company blog, Google made this announcement (read the official release):
“Our team found that certain aggregated search queries tend to be very common during flu season each year. We compared these aggregated queries against data provided by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and we found that there’s a very close relationship between the frequency of these search queries and the number of people who are experiencing flu-like symptoms each week. As a result, if we tally each day’s flu-related search queries, we can estimate how many people have a flu-like illness.”
Translation — “When people come down with the flu, they seem to be going online and searching for treatments and cures. By tracking the movement of this search engine activity, we can see where it’s spreading, how fast it’s moving, where we need to allocate resources, and much more.”
There you have it, folks. From Alaska to Maine, with a detour in Los Angeles and probably a million places in between… Google is reinventing the search engine to do more than just sell products. But I’m guessing no one will complain if the local pharmacy up in Maine loads up on cold and flu medicine.
Curious to know what people searched on 2014. Watch the following video:
