Python in Ohio
Kevin Day, November 18th, 2007A recent thread on reddit about cool Google Trends had me looking for interesting trends myself. I’m not sure if Google Trends always had this feature, but I just noticed that you can filter the results by state.
When I ran a search of programming languages within Ohio only, I found that “python” hasn’t been a significant search term in Ohio until 2005, where it is most popular in the Columbus area.
However, I think most python searches are for the actual snake, based on this search for snakes:
I guess python has a long way to go to before becoming popular in Ohio.
I guess you could make some inference about Ohioans being less afraid of snakes than programming languages.
Unless…
Google tends to “know” whether you’re searching for the snake or the language; maybe Trends adapts to context too?
What happened October 2005?
- Jeff Schuler, November 19th, 2007, 1:33 amAt first I thought that spike was just a random blip, but it looks like it’s a little more interesting than that:
“Python Tries to Eat Alligator, Explodes”
- Kevin Day, November 19th, 2007, 10:44 pmhttp://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2005-10-05-python-gator_x.htm
Heh. Looks like you’re right.
- Jeff Schuler, November 20th, 2007, 11:02 amhttp://www.google.com/trends?q=alligator%2C+python&ctab=0&hl=en&geo=US&geor=usa.oh&date=all&sort=0
As for the blip for ‘alligator’ in May 2006…
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=alligator&btnG=Search+Archives&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&um=1&scoring=t&as_ldate=04-2006&as_hdate=06-2006
(Is that (news search by date) how you went about it?)
Yeah, I did a news search by date. This is the query I used:
http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=python&hl=en&sa=N&sugg=d&as_ldate=2005&as_hdate=2005&lnav=d2&ldrange=1980,2004&hdrange=2006,2007
I guess both stories show that if you want to drive a lot of web traffic just pull some stunt involving reptiles. That second spike was about half as big as the first, so I would have to conclude that web searches are directly proportional to the number of reptiles in a news story.
- Kevin Day, November 20th, 2007, 9:44 pm