

Bizarre Google Trend Search Spike - nikgregory
http://nikgregory.com/2010/11/bizarre-google-trend-search-spike/

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uptown
It happens. According to Google Analytics a website I built had 14.4 billion
in revenue one day in November, 2008. While I wish it was true, the bigger
problem is that any chart that includes this datapoint is essentially useless
since it dwarfs the daily revenue of every other day.

~~~
citricsquid
I think that's your cue to write an ebook!

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fbcocq
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Trends>

"Originally, Google neglected updating Google Trends on a regular basis. In
March 2007, internet bloggers noticed that Google had not added new data since
November 2006, and Trends was updated within a week. Google did not update
Trends from March until July 30, and only after it was blogged about,
again.[2] Google now claims to be "updating the information provided by Google
Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly."

Google Insights for Search seems to be better for this sort of analysis since
it offers regional filtering options and puts the searched term into context.

[http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=xkcd%2Cpenny%20arca...](http://www.google.com/insights/search/#q=xkcd%2Cpenny%20arcade&cmpt=q)

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citricsquid
Seems they had an error with how it calculated? The spike exists for
everything I can find that existed back then, but the spike seems relative to
the total, so maybe they _accidentally_ counted 1 search as 2 or something?
Maybe it was an issue with their use of ajax that caused 2 search requests to
be fired off to google? Maybe the data isn't wrong, maybe something caused
extra searches?

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=newgrounds,+reddit,+paul+grah...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=newgrounds,+reddit,+paul+graham,+armorgames&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

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pbhjpbhj
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1937589> look at the drilldown results,
does it still show a spike?

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ryanc
Bizarre Google Trend Spikes are traditionally caused by 4chan, it doesn't seem
like that is the case here though.

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mcantor
Upvoted for germane usage of the terms "traditional" and "4chan" in the same
sentence.

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benmathes
Goodbye, Hacker News, I miss your useful discussions.

~~~
jrockway
<picture of lolcat>

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pbhjpbhj
If you look at the one year graph for 2007 the spike is missing -
[http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2Cyahoo%2Cmicrosoft...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=google%2Cyahoo%2Cmicrosoft&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2007&sort=0).
Zoom out to all years and it's there.

Similarly there's no spike if you look at just the US or just the UK.

Perhaps Baidu was down or something but it seems most likely an error on just
the compiled graph.

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klbarry
I don't think google would manually repair the data but rather just fix the
part of the data collector that made the mistake.

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brk
Do they even _have_ the ability to repair the data? If information is logged
in real-time, and there is no easy way to filter through billions of search
query terms to de-dupe (or whatever fix may be required), it might not be
possible to correct the dataset.

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notyourwork
Care to elaborate on why you feel they cannot correct the data? I am having
trouble understanding.

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wladimir
Because the original data on which the statistics are based was probably
deleted a long time ago. And that's the only way to get the 'right' numbers.
The only option would be to filter out the peak, then again, this will also
lose all real information in that timespan. Just too much bother.

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harry
I doubt google - or any similar company who relies upon data aggregation and
collection - makes a habit of deleting data.

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uxp
I would assume that google, or any other similar data aggregation company,
would log and keep statistics and summary information, but discard actual raw
data. They do have some of the biggest storage capabilities, but thats no
reason to fill it full of apache logs.

