Using Google to observe human collective dynamics
HumansPosted by Mehdi Moussaid Tue, December 08, 2009 19:08:26Recently, Google has released two nice tools that could be used to observe nice patterns of humans activity.
The first one is Google trends. It allows you to see how often a specific keyword has been searched on Google over time. One can easily observe some nice 'herding' phenomena where everybody is suddenly paying attention to one specific event. For example, the search curve for keyword 'Harry Potter' shows a sudden peak during summer 2007. By cumulating the search volume day after day, you find a nice S-shaped curve, typical from phase transitions. Here, the transition is from a state where nobody cares about Harry Potter to a state where most people have paid attention to it. The same kind of curves can be observed for keywords 'tsunami' in 2004 (with a sharper transition), or 'bejing' in 2008 and many others. I've been talking about that during the last ECCS conference (see here).
Similarly, I was surprised by the astonishing regularities of search patterns over years. Try to compare the curves for keywords such as 'snow' , 'beach' , 'football', or 'mothers day' , 'fathers day': Each year displays the exact same search pattern, same peaks , same slope... and even the same mistakes, such as a small amount of people searching for 'fathers day' during August... (See also the nice pattern for the keyword 'science').
The other tool is Google flu trends, which displays data about the flu epidemics over the world. Again, there are many interesting things to say and to observe, such as the regularities of the epidemics over years, the spreading of the flu among neighboring countries, or the great correlations between these curves and the search volume for the keyword 'flu' each year... Therefore, it's not a surprise that a team from Google Inc. has made a Nature paper out of it:
Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
For sure, there's a lot to learn just by observing the web.
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