It's great to see Google getting into time series in their zeitgeist (though I wish they would explain what the vertical axis represents - absolute counts? normalized counts?). One thing charts like that below make possible is the comparison of trends in mainstream search with posts in blogs. For example, Google's trends for Harry Potter related terms:
compares well with that for blog posts:
However, Google's view of interest in Weapons of Mass Destruction:
is not at all similar to that from the blogosphere:
Even though we don't know precisely what Google is trending, the difference is not going to account for such a marked difference in the later two trends. To me, this suggests that the search public and the blogging public are very different things when it comes to politics.
Update: Natalie Glance points to an obvious error in my analysis above: the Google chart is for 2 years where as there is only 1 year of data in the blog chart that I created.
Google's trend graph for WMD is from January 2004 through December 2005. Thus, it spans two years. If you compare 2005 with the BlogPulse trend graph for 2005, they appear to match up pretty well.
Posted by: Natalie Glance | December 21, 2005 at 09:51 AM