ZeitGeist: Unveiling Internet Trends

by ViTo • May 16, 2006 2 comments

A fashion consists of a current (constantly changing) trend, favoured for frivolous rather than practical, logical, or intellectual reasons.

That’s the definition I got from wikipedia. Nobody can explain them, yet for some reason people start talking about something and it will become popular. It goes from commercial products or tv shows to celebrities and their lives. There are many industries built on the concept such as the clothes industry or the yellow press, since when something catches on it can provide a lot of money. Therefore they try to make huge profits by creating (and imposing) new trends. Having control over the media that is not very hard to do, still nobody can explain why something may catch on or will simply be ignored.

Internet is formed by a huge user community and there will obviously appear trends, yet the situation is much different. Due to its highly distributed nature nobody has control over it. This means the trends are more pure since they arise and die without outter influences. Yet again, due to the distributed content we cannot discover what’s hot at that moment. Only somebody with a more complete view of the net may have relevant data. We all know who the king is… Google without any doubt. As you can see 4 out of 10 people (and growing) use it as a search engine (I really thought their share was bigger, I don’t know anybody who doesn’t use it as a search engine, yet 40% is still more than enough for valid data), so their view is definitely relevant.

Recently they decided to make this data public (there is no concern about anonimity or single user patterns: this is global data, so no single user can be pointed out) and with a very neat interface by the way. Although this may not be relevant from a business point of view I find the patterns that can be observed very interesting: another of the useless (and cool) features I love so much. The service name is ZeitGeist, a german word which comes from Time (Zeit) + Spirit (Geist).

Here are last’s week top 5 google searches:

1. chernobyl
2. scarlett johansson
3. freedom tower
4. tony snow
5. wii

Interesting? not that much, we already knew Scarlett was so hot! It’s much better looking at different countries patterns. The top search in Spain is juegos (games), you can see what we are thinking about… that would be completely fine if it also were the top query in other countries, but when looking at Germany we find wikipedia at the top. No wonder why they are Europe’s main economy and we are… errrm what we are. Apparently french are stuck in front of their tv sets (query: “programme tv”) and italian seem to wonder about their future (query:orsocopo), yet who wouldn’t with Berlusconi as president. The list goes on and so do surprising results. The top search in poland is… Chuck Norris! what the hell? That caught me a little off guard. After snooping around a bit I came across his facts list, yet one would think it takes more than a 3 month old website to make it to the top.

Not interested yet? Google takes it one step further with the recent Google Trends release which allows users to see how any query variates through time. How accurate is the data? Nobody knows, Google states it is valid enough though they recommend not basing your PhD on it. As far as I have seen the results seem to go together with already known facts. For example, let’s take the Internet explorer vs Firefox war. As you can see the former is slowly losing momentum while the latter is constantly growing. What a surprise… The same goes for slashdot vs digg or google videos vs youtube.

When looking at real life facts results are still coherent. Powerball queries increase a lot when somebody wins a big jackpot or regular events like superbowl trigger the queries once a year. So now what? Let’s start the non-sense comparing… What’s the most post popular fruit? Who is ahead in the neverending war between coke and pepsi? Most popular search engine: Google, Yahoo or MSN? Let’s see what you can come up with…