Google Trends has been all over the blogs recently. They recently launched Google Trends for Websites, a service which has been getting some slack from bloggers. The argument goes that they aren't really providing useful enough data for smaller websites and blogs, which would be a big portion of the interested audience. Then, of course, the upcoming election has people wondering how accurate of a predictive tool Google Trends could be. It's certainly more representative of mass opinion than sites such as Politweets, which because of their bias towards early tech adopters swayed heavily towards Ron Paul in the early primary process.
But, the most interesting story about Google Trends that I have read recently was a piece in the New York Times about Google Trends being used in a pornography trial in Florida. The argument goes something like this:
"In a novel approach, the defense in an obscenity trial in Florida plans to use publicly accessible Google search data to try to persuade jurors that their neighbors have broader interests than they might have thought.
"In the trial of a pornographic Web site operator, the defense plans to show that residents of Pensacola are more likely to use Google to search for terms like 'orgy' than for 'apple pie' or 'watermelon.' The publicly accessible data is vague in that it does not specify how many people are searching for the terms, just their relative popularity over time. But the defense lawyer, Lawrence Walters, is arguing that the evidence is sufficient to demonstrate that interest in the sexual subjects exceeds that of more mainstream topics -- and that by extension, the sexual material distributed by his client is not outside the norm . . .
"The search data he is using is available through a service called Google Trends. It allows users to compare search trends in a given area, showing, for instance, that residents of Pensacola are more likely to search for sexual terms than some more wholesome ones."
The article then goes on to prove that when matched search for search against words like "surfing" and "Nintendo", however, the defense's argument completely backfires. I can't even think of a scenario that I would commonly search for the term "watermelon" on the internet, unless I was looking for an online retailer to sell me seeds for a garden. Still, it's an interesting argument.
Obscenity trials in the past have used items such as pornographic magazines and videos available at local stores as a judge for what the community considers decent versus indecent. In modern trials, defense attorneys have been trying to make the move to the availability of web content, and now to search behavior. So far, it hasn't worked to their advantage, but as more and more detailed analytic tools become available, it will be interesting to see if that changes.
Sure, in this recent case about "apple pie" versus "orgy", the connection to actual human behavior and intent is somewhat laughable... but just think about it. Once you start adding social graphs and common language search into the equation, couldn't search behavior patterns and trends start to be a lot more connected to the actual values and interests of a "community"? We even have FriendFeed and their micromeme suggesting a sort of Google Trends for groups of friends.
Just another example of power to put in the "scary Google" category. Thanks to Bridget McKinley for sharing this article with me.
Marta Strickland
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