Google trends hysteria

The blogoshpere is on fire this week touting the vitures of Google Trends. For the uninformed, Google Trends graphs a number of search terms and provides graphs about how the terms have been searched over time. The tool allows you to graph multiple terms on the same graph quickly and easily. It also shows you geographical popularity of the terms.

A lot of people are taking some pretty big leaps with the data, however. A post from Micro Persuasion lists 25 things I learned from Google Trends. Things like "Flickr is the king of tagging, followed by del.icio.us..." Does this really an indication of which tagging is more popular? Does the fact that Flickr allows people to upload and share photos  have anything to do with this?  How about "Hockey is starting to surpass baseball in popularity...". I think ticket sales would argue otherwise. 

If you read the Google Trends description, "Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph." Nothing more, nothing less. Are Google searches indication of other trends? Possibly but you need support from other sources to make legitimate conclusions. - Paul Herring