Venture Views
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- Technology PR with Prompt: An interview with Ipswitch File Transfer’s Sophie Pellissier
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- Innovation Nation: Celebrating a proud pioneering tradition
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- Read all about it! Are print newspapers fated to fold? (Part 1)
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Google's new toy: Google Trends
Google's new toy: Google Trends
Google’s launched four new products, of which the most interesting is Google Trends. This enables you to enter keywords and see how the number of searches for them has changed over time. It puts flags against peaks and troughs with links to relevant news stories.
But the graph doesn’t have a scale, making it largely meaningless. Compare this graph of Radiohead vs Pet Shop Boys, which tells us Radiohead is much more popular, with this graph that tells you that they’re both small beer compared to Pink Floyd.
The problem is that there’s no scale shown. So while we can tell that Radiohead is perhaps ten times more popular than the Pet Shop Boys at times, we can’t tell if that’s 90 people who are more interested in the band, or 9000. The scale changed on the second graph too, making it even harder to get meaningful data from the graph (see how Radiohead and the Pet Shop Boys look much closer together now).
Google Trends is an interesting visual interface, but it seems to lack the rigour required to really help with Google’s mission to organise the world’s information. It’s still much more of a toy than a tool.
