Google trends revealed

Google just announced a new service/website called google trends, and its been an interesting ride. I tried out some searches just for the heck of it, not really expecting anything very interesting, but boy, was I wrong.

Here are some interesting searches/comparisons:

India vs. China (surprising result though)

Bangalore vs. Hyderabad (I wish I could say Bangalore rocks...)

Google vs. Yahoo (this one's a bit misrepresentative, remember you are already on Google searching and no, its not really a search engine popularity comparison either. )

Bush vs. Kerry (from the US presidential election 2 years ago, notice how Kerry tapers after the election frezy was over)

PC vs. Mac vs. Linux vs. Unix (a bit hard to interpret)

Manmohan Singh vs. Sonia Gandhi

MIT vs. Stanford vs. Harvard (apparently MIT rules)

Ubuntu vs. Redhat (notice how Ubuntu comes out of nowhere in 2004, coinciding with the release of the first major version of Ubuntu then)

And now for some interesting ones (I'll explain why..):
Red Sox vs. Yankees (the spike you see in 2004 corresponds to when the redsox won the baseball world series after a 100 year gap)

The Olympics (the 2004 peak corresponds to the olympics held in greece, the 2006 peak corresponds to the 2006 winder olympics, the small 2005 peak is a mystery, if anyone figures it out, please comment)

Coke vs. Pepsi (here's whats strange about this one, look below at the countries with the most searches, new zealand has the most searches for Coke?!!!?!? Apparently the country with 70 sheep per person also does 70 times (pure underestimate) more searches for coke, but not pepsi per capita than the rest of us)

Cricket vs. Soccer vs. Baseball vs. Football (this one's pretty complicated, notice the cyclical search pattern for football and baseball corresponding to peak seasons for the games. The peaks for football are not for any american version of football but are really for the real football aka soccer as the most searches come from the UK, figure it out :)

If you have gotten this far, I guess you have tried many if not most of the searches above, and hopefully many of your own. Its really interesting how certain searches/trends peak at certain times, when some significant event has occured. Its also very interesting looking at the regional split of the searches, to see who was searching for these terms when and and (if you can figure it out) why. Its like looking at some form of global consciousness on the wolrd wide web over a period of time, scary and wierd..