Social Science Statistics Blog

Some observations:

1) One thing that is interesting (though in hindsight not surprising) is that Google Trends seems like a decent tool for identifying how marked a form is. The basic idea is that a default term is unmarked (and often unsaid), but the marked term must be used in order to communicate that concept. For instance, in many sociological domains, "female" is marked more than "male" is -- hence people refer to "female Presidents" a lot more than they refer to "male Presidents", even though there are many more of the latter: the adjective "male" is unnecessary because it just feels redundant. In contrast, you much more often say "male nurse" than "female nurse", because masculinity is marked in the nursing context.

Anyway, I noticed that for many sets of words, the term that is searched for most often is the marked term, even though the unmarked term probably occurs numerically more often. For instance, Blacks, whites indicates far more queries for "blacks"; Gay, straight many more for "gay"; and Rich, poor, middle class the most for rich, followed by poor, and least of all middle class.

I have two hypotheses to explain this: (a) people generally google for information, and seek information about what they don't know; so it's not surprising that more people don't know about the non-default, usually numerically smaller item. And, (b) since unmarked means it doesn't need to be used, it's not really a surprise that people don't use it. Still, I thought it was interesting. And clearly this phenomenon, if real at all, is at most only one of many factors affecting query frequency: for instance, Christian, atheist, muslim indicates far more hits for "Christian", and those in very Christian areas.

2) Another observation: the first five numbers seem to have search frequencies that drop by half with each consecutive number. Is this interesting for cognitive reasons? I have no idea.

3) As far as I can tell, no search occurs more often than "sex." If anyone can find something with greater frequency, I'd love to hear it. On the one hand, it may say good things for our species that "love" beats out "hate", but that may just mean more people are searching for love than hate. And "war" beats out "peace", sadly enough.

4) "Hate bush" peaked right before the 2004 election, "love bush" about six months before that. I have no idea what that's all about.

5) It's amazing to me how many people clearly must use incredibly unspecific searches: who searches for "one"? Or "book"? Though there is no indication of numbers (a y axis on these graphs would be incredibly handy), a search needs a minimum number of queries otherwise it won't show up, so somebody must be making these.

6) In conclusion, I note that Harvard has more queries than MIT. Does this mean that MIT is the "default"? Or that Harvard generates more interest? Since I'm an MIT student but writing for a Harvard blog, I plead conflict of interest...