What Are You Looking at??

You'd be surprised!

I was reading an article on interesting websites to check out and came across one I had heard of but never investigated: Google Trends.

Head over to Google Trends for a look. Google Trends is a near real time look at what the world is searching for when they do those millions of internet searches each day. It offers data in three categories:

• Real-Time Data: Google Trends provides near real-time data on search queries, reflecting what users are interested in at any moment.

• Historical Trends: Users can analyze search interest over various time frames, from as little as a day to historical data dating back to 2004.

• Comparative Analysis: The tool allows for the comparison of multiple search terms, helping users identify which queries are more popular relative to others.

What's cool about the site is that you can research searches in the past hour, past 4 hours, past 24 hours, past 48 hours or past 7 days. You can also search by specific categories like vehicles, entertainment, sports, etc.

You can also search by COUNTRY. This was especially interesting to me - once I did a few looks at trends here in the United States, I explored what our friends in Ireland are looking at. Their top searches this week include - Croatia vs England, Kathleen Carey, two articles on budgets and Christa Pike, the woman in Tennessee who survived two botched attempts at lethal injection execution for torturing and murdering a classmate when she was 18 years old.

I started looking at the past 24 hours here in the United States and since it's the Monday morning after Sunday's NFL games, there's some interest in football:

But when I change the view to the last four hours, (Now 11:45 AM), the trends have changed:

Turns out Dennis Hastert has passed away, some squishy toys have been recalled, Pete Hegseth chugs "Spider-Man's Non-Alcoholic Beer on SNL, and Coco Gauff, the tennis athlete, set a new WTA record after winning her latest match at the China Open.

The internet is interesting if nothing else.

Let's head over to Iran and see what they're searching for:

Hmmm, seems I can't read Persian - but I can click on a particular story and ask for it to be translated to English for me - seems they're worked up about an infectious plague caused by the bacteria Yersinia pestis, found in small mammals and their fleas.

You can also explore a custom time range. If you specify the top searches from back in 2004 when Google started collecting data to present day, you can get a feel for what was important to us here in the United States spread over time in various topics:

Top searches:

1. YouTube

2. Pornhub

3. iPhone

4. Reddit

5. Facebook

6. Twitter

7. X social network

8. Instagram

9. Minecraft

10. Google Translate

11. Wordle

12. Zillow

13. Walmart

14. COVID-19 - Disease

15. Food near me

16. Google maps

17. Tumblr

18. Google classroom

19. Amazon prime

20. Coronavirus

21. Google docs

22. Roblox

23. Hulu

24. Pinterest

25. LinkedIn

26. Restaurants near me

27. Weather tomorrow

28. Indeed

29. Meme

30. ChatGPT

31. ETSY

32. Angry Birds

33. Tinder

34. Craigslist

35. Artificial Intelligence

All I can say is that when future generations look back on the data preserved from today's society at a historical perspective, they're either going to be very confused or just shake their heads.

I hope you enjoyed this exploration as much as I enjoyed researching it.