Google correlate

[bill]

Google Correlate finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends.
https://www.google.com/trends/correlate/draw?p=us

Not sure how useful this drawing feature will be, but I could see where this could help pad out a presentation.

[littleman]

It might be a way of getting at what's getting the latest buzz by drawing a quick spike at the end of the time line.

[h00t]

Excellent, thanks for the heads up.

[ergophobe]

Bill... are we connected on FAcebook? Can't remember.

Anyway, I had a real interesting discussion there on Correlate. I had gathered some publicly available data such as obesity rates by state and looked to see what search terms correlated. I believe that obesity search terms correlate with rap music mostly.

I ran this by two friends - a professional statistician and a physicist/number cruncher/technologist/culture watcher (no idea how to describe him - PhD on cosmic rays back in 1974). My statistician friend pointed out that G Correlate does a two-pass correlation, meaning it finds the first thing that seems reasonably close and then uses that data to grab more (I'm hazy on the details as this was a while ago).

Many data sets that seem large are actually quite small - obesity by state having only 51 data points, murders by year, 2005-2011 having only six data points. So you often get fairly random correlations. Then Google takes that first correlation and does a second pass for related terms that also correlate and that tends to exaggerate the random correlation that you got the first time around.

All that to say that Google Correlate clearly has its uses (flu outbreak recognition), but it also has a tremendous amount of noise.

[ergophobe]

Ah... found the FB thread and realized I had a blog post about it with excerpts from Doug's comments (see the UPDATES section at the end - that's the interesting part).

http://raisedbyturtles.org/obesity-rap-and-the-google-correlate-tool/

Of course, when I went to my blog post, my JagPC acct was suspended for non-payment while I was away on vacation. Just my blog on there and a couple of other things. I had thought I'd be fully moved before expiry.

[bill]

Yes, we're connected on FB, but I rarely check that so it's possible I missed that conversation.

Interesting blog post. I didn't realize Correlate had been out that long. Like you say there is a lot of noise on there. I'm glad there are ways to cut through that noise to get something a bit more meaningful.

[ergophobe]

Yes, we're connected on FB, but I rarely check that so it's possible I missed that conversation.

I *assume* people miss my comments on FB, I just wondered if I would be able to tag you in that thread and have it pop up. But the essence of it is in the UPDATe section of the blog post.... still, it was a good discussion, something I should point to to people who say they don't use FB because they don't care what kind of coffee I'm drinking.