To give you a sense of its tremendous power for tapping into the world psyche, here are 25 things I learned on Google Trends. Someone should start a blog on this kind of stuff.
1) Almost all of the ten biggest US markets for MySpace are on the West Coast
2) There’s more interest in Bluetooth than in Wifi
3) PR is starting to come close to catching advertising. AdAge still bests PR Week
4) David Hasselhoff’s popularity in Germany is declining
5) Jerry Lewis’s popularity in France is rising
6) Blackberry is widening its lead over the Treo
7) Zacharias Moussaoui finally beat OJ Simpson in searches
8) Hockey is starting to surpass baseball in popularity, but they fall way behind football (no matter which way it is defined)
9) New York still tops LA!
10) The Kryptonite Lock got more PR from the blog blow-up than any other event during the past two years
11) TV is kicking the movies butt
12) Dogs are by far killing all other pets while cats and fish battle for second place
13) Democrats vs. Republicans? Yup, they’re neck and neck and on my screen red and blue!
14) YouTube is huge in the Philippines. Call it the Mike Abundo effect.
15) Blogs have caught up to newspapers. Boing Boing and Gizmodo are close to catching the WSJ
16) The beach is more popular than the mountains
17) Wikipedia is huge in Eastern Europe and it started to lead Britannica, Encarta and Webster’s in 2004
18) Digg is still way behind CNET but it caught up to Slashdot. MySpace speed ahead of AOL last year
19) Interest in blogs and RSS is much higher than in podcasting and wikis
20) Flickr is the king of tagging, followed by del.icio.us and furl
21) Web 2.0 is huge in Korea – even bigger than in San Francisco
22) Elvis and The Beatles are in a dead heat
23) Word is more popular than any other Office app. Outlook and Excel are in a tie, followed by Powerpoint.
24) Bill Gates is slaughtering Steve Jobs in searches
25) Google is bigger than God?
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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.
He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.
