Forget the (potentially biased) small sample debate reaction thermometer - "the worm". Here's Google's alternative: total search traffic over the last year.
The chart shows New Zealand search volumes for National (or the party Leader's name, or the Deputy Leader's name), Labour (or the Leader or Deputy), the Greens (or either Co-Leader), and ACT (or Brash or Banks). "Election" is included as a benchmark for overall election interest.
Let's zoom in on the last month:
What do we see? Almost as much Google traffic on "National Party" as on "Election"; the Greens overtaking Labour in search traffic, though not by as much as in prior elections; and, ACT trailing, though not by as much as I'd expected.
The regional breakdowns are fun too, but not easily embedded. More grist for trading at iPredict. Or, at least it would be if they provided real-time traffic data.
Showing posts with label Google Search Insights. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google Search Insights. Show all posts
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
Monday, 19 September 2011
An interesting error
I'd last week wondered whether long term decline in celebrity search interest predicts release of private photographs.
Turns out, my results were wrong. I'd provided search traffic data on "Scarlett Johannson", not on "Scarlett Johansson". The former, a typo, had long term decline, followed by a surge in interest with the release of artistically-shot nude photos from her cell phone; the latter has a noisy but flat long term curve with, again, a massive spike in search interest with the photo release.
In my defence, I'm not the only one that got the name wrong. This one's funny as the misspelled name in the Washington Post headline is matched with a cover of GQ (as part of the WP story) where the name is spelled right.
The graphs are up as an update to the original post.
It's interesting that the version with the typo has long term decline while the correct spelling has noisy but stable interest: the proportion of people interested in searching for Scarlett is increasingly made up of folks who know how to spell her name. But, with the photo release, we get a spike in all searches on the name, including those spelling it incorrectly. Unfortunately, you can't compare search volumes unless you put them on the same graph; when you put them on the same graph, volume on the typo normalizes to zero for the period prior to the photo release, after which it increases to 1 (searches on the properly spelled name normalize to 100 with the photo release). It would be mildly interesting to see if a greater proportion of searches post-photo include the typo.
Turns out, my results were wrong. I'd provided search traffic data on "Scarlett Johannson", not on "Scarlett Johansson". The former, a typo, had long term decline, followed by a surge in interest with the release of artistically-shot nude photos from her cell phone; the latter has a noisy but flat long term curve with, again, a massive spike in search interest with the photo release.
In my defence, I'm not the only one that got the name wrong. This one's funny as the misspelled name in the Washington Post headline is matched with a cover of GQ (as part of the WP story) where the name is spelled right.
The graphs are up as an update to the original post.
It's interesting that the version with the typo has long term decline while the correct spelling has noisy but stable interest: the proportion of people interested in searching for Scarlett is increasingly made up of folks who know how to spell her name. But, with the photo release, we get a spike in all searches on the name, including those spelling it incorrectly. Unfortunately, you can't compare search volumes unless you put them on the same graph; when you put them on the same graph, volume on the typo normalizes to zero for the period prior to the photo release, after which it increases to 1 (searches on the properly spelled name normalize to 100 with the photo release). It would be mildly interesting to see if a greater proportion of searches post-photo include the typo.
Friday, 16 September 2011
Searching for Scarlett [Updated]
Update below: scroll to bottom please.
Yesterday's Twitter feed brought news that Scarlett Johannson's phone had apparently been hacked and that nude pictures had been posted on the web. Let's see what Google Insights for Search can tell us.
First, we can see a long decline in search interest after a peak in January 2006. There have been spikes along the way, but the trend isn't good for Scarlett if search interest correlates with other measures of star appeal. But see that little up-tick at the end? That's what happened after the apparently fairly tame (I haven't looked, honest) pictures found their way out of her phone and onto the web.
Let's zoom in on the past year:
I wonder whether long term decline in search interest can predict whether nude pictures or sex tapes accidentally find their way onto the web.*
Apologies if the embedded graphs suffer a form of link-rot; it seems not to let me embed particular date ranges but rather only "2004 to present" or "last 12 months". If the effect looks odd and you're reading this sometime after the post date, just hit the link back to Google and restrict the search range appropriately.
* You might also wonder whether bloggers that put some value on inflating SiteMeter stats have incentive to come up with excuses to add words like "Scarlett Johannson" and "nude" into their posts. And I would be shocked! if you thought that such considerations ever entered my mind. I'd tweeted yesterday predicting a spike in Search Insights; I'm today pleased to see the prediction bear out. Nothing more. If you've come here searching for "hot nude photos of Scarlett Johannson", I'm sorry to have disappointed. But folks with such prurient interest might like to check out my posts on the economics of pornography and of prostitution, though I promise that those posts are only intellectually titillating.
UPDATE: The results above are erroneous. Why? Because the search above includes a typo. If we search on "Scarlett Johansson", the proper spelling of her name, instead of "Scarlett Johannson", we get a different picture. Instead of long term decline, we get a noisy stable level of interest:
The massive hike in interest with the photo release is real though. Just look at the numbers for the last year:
First, we can see a long decline in search interest after a peak in January 2006. There have been spikes along the way, but the trend isn't good for Scarlett if search interest correlates with other measures of star appeal. But see that little up-tick at the end? That's what happened after the apparently fairly tame (I haven't looked, honest) pictures found their way out of her phone and onto the web.
Let's zoom in on the past year:
I wonder whether long term decline in search interest can predict whether nude pictures or sex tapes accidentally find their way onto the web.*
Apologies if the embedded graphs suffer a form of link-rot; it seems not to let me embed particular date ranges but rather only "2004 to present" or "last 12 months". If the effect looks odd and you're reading this sometime after the post date, just hit the link back to Google and restrict the search range appropriately.
* You might also wonder whether bloggers that put some value on inflating SiteMeter stats have incentive to come up with excuses to add words like "Scarlett Johannson" and "nude" into their posts. And I would be shocked! if you thought that such considerations ever entered my mind. I'd tweeted yesterday predicting a spike in Search Insights; I'm today pleased to see the prediction bear out. Nothing more. If you've come here searching for "hot nude photos of Scarlett Johannson", I'm sorry to have disappointed. But folks with such prurient interest might like to check out my posts on the economics of pornography and of prostitution, though I promise that those posts are only intellectually titillating.
UPDATE: The results above are erroneous. Why? Because the search above includes a typo. If we search on "Scarlett Johansson", the proper spelling of her name, instead of "Scarlett Johannson", we get a different picture. Instead of long term decline, we get a noisy stable level of interest:
The massive hike in interest with the photo release is real though. Just look at the numbers for the last year:
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Atlas Moments revisited
I'd spent a bit of time last year arguing that the whole "going Galt" thing was overblown: that there was no evidence of any huge resurgence of interest in Ayn Rand's ideas with the recent economic crisis. Or, at least there was no evidence of it in Google search traffic data.
Now Google's released Ngram: a search tool that checks the relative frequency of different terms found in books scanned by Google, sorted by date. Unfortunately it only goes up through 2008 so we can't fully verify what was in the search traffic. But here's the Ngrams.
First, Rand by herself.
Book mentions of Rand peak in 2001 and are reasonably down by 2008.
Objectivism peaks in the mid 1990s.
And while Rand is doing better relative to Marx, that's mainly due to the latter's strong decline since the 1980s.
I'll expect that there's a mild upswing for Rand in 2008-2009 once that data comes out, but that there was no Atlas Moment.
Now Google's released Ngram: a search tool that checks the relative frequency of different terms found in books scanned by Google, sorted by date. Unfortunately it only goes up through 2008 so we can't fully verify what was in the search traffic. But here's the Ngrams.
First, Rand by herself.
Book mentions of Rand peak in 2001 and are reasonably down by 2008.
Objectivism peaks in the mid 1990s.
And while Rand is doing better relative to Marx, that's mainly due to the latter's strong decline since the 1980s.
I'll expect that there's a mild upswing for Rand in 2008-2009 once that data comes out, but that there was no Atlas Moment.
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Wishful thinking
David Boaz at Cato says Ayn Rand is in. Maybe. I've heard book sales are up. But you've gotta compare it to the competition. I haven't data on relative book sales, but we still have Google search data.
Google Search Insights shows a mild up-blip in Rand-related searches in the first quarter of 2009, then a drift back down; searches on Marx continue to dominate both in volume and in linked news stories. Boaz also notes resurgent interest in Hayek; Google Search Insights says nothing to see there.
Again, Marx in blue, Rand in red, Hayek in yellow. Clicking through on the Google link shows that in none of the top-ten Rand countries does Rand beat Marx in search popularity. Hitting any of the tags below will bring up previous iterations of the Rand vs Marx on Google Search Insights; do check there to see if your immediate objections to the use of this method have already been answered.
Google Search Insights shows a mild up-blip in Rand-related searches in the first quarter of 2009, then a drift back down; searches on Marx continue to dominate both in volume and in linked news stories. Boaz also notes resurgent interest in Hayek; Google Search Insights says nothing to see there.
Again, Marx in blue, Rand in red, Hayek in yellow. Clicking through on the Google link shows that in none of the top-ten Rand countries does Rand beat Marx in search popularity. Hitting any of the tags below will bring up previous iterations of the Rand vs Marx on Google Search Insights; do check there to see if your immediate objections to the use of this method have already been answered.
Thursday, 22 October 2009
Going Galt
Reprising my earlier skepticism, here's the current Google Search Insights trends on objectivist libertarianism versus communism, with searches on "recession" given as a benchmark. Embedding these charts still not working right (why can't Blogger integrate with Google Insights for Search in Chrome? Where is John Galt?)
Blue gives total searches on any of ("Das Kapital", "Das Capital", "Communist Manifesto", Marxism, Communism, "Karl Marx", "Carl Marx").
Red gives total searches on any of ("Atlas Shrugged", Objectivism, "Ayn Rand", "Ann Rand", "The Fountainhead", "Virtue of Selfishness", "John Galt", "Going Galt"). The last term added just for Alex.
Yellow gives searches on "recession" as a scaling term. Note that I didn't put in "depression" because then I have to figure out all of the keywords to exclude to knock out searches on psychiatric disorders.
A slight up-blip around February of this year. Top ten countries for the Objectivist searches? USA, India, Canada, Phillipines, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia. In none of those ten countries are the Objectivist search terms more popular than the Communist ones, though this surely is affected by the number of schools requiring reports on communism (huge seasonality in the Communist searches that corresponds to Northern Hemisphere school year, no such seasonality in Objectivist searches.)
Of course, we wouldn't expect a true "Going Galt" moment to be evidenced by lots of Google Searches on objectivism. Rather, we'd see lots of Google searches on things like "Where did Sergey Brin disappear to?" "Going Galt" was always meant to be something for the top 0.1% anyway: Eddie Willers isn't invited. But continued evidence against a mass surge of interest in Objectivism.
Blue gives total searches on any of ("Das Kapital", "Das Capital", "Communist Manifesto", Marxism, Communism, "Karl Marx", "Carl Marx").
Red gives total searches on any of ("Atlas Shrugged", Objectivism, "Ayn Rand", "Ann Rand", "The Fountainhead", "Virtue of Selfishness", "John Galt", "Going Galt"). The last term added just for Alex.
Yellow gives searches on "recession" as a scaling term. Note that I didn't put in "depression" because then I have to figure out all of the keywords to exclude to knock out searches on psychiatric disorders.
A slight up-blip around February of this year. Top ten countries for the Objectivist searches? USA, India, Canada, Phillipines, Norway, Singapore, South Africa, New Zealand, Sweden, Australia. In none of those ten countries are the Objectivist search terms more popular than the Communist ones, though this surely is affected by the number of schools requiring reports on communism (huge seasonality in the Communist searches that corresponds to Northern Hemisphere school year, no such seasonality in Objectivist searches.)
Of course, we wouldn't expect a true "Going Galt" moment to be evidenced by lots of Google Searches on objectivism. Rather, we'd see lots of Google searches on things like "Where did Sergey Brin disappear to?" "Going Galt" was always meant to be something for the top 0.1% anyway: Eddie Willers isn't invited. But continued evidence against a mass surge of interest in Objectivism.
Monday, 19 October 2009
New uses of Google Search data: stock performance
Stocks of companies subject to heavy Google search traffic during IPO show large first-day returns and longer term underperformance. At least until the Lucas critique kicks in.
Turnover, extreme returns, news and advertising expense are indirect proxies of investor attention. In contrast, we propose a direct measure of investor demand for attention -- active attention -- using search frequency in Google (SVI). In a sample of Russell 3000 stocks from 2004 to 2008, we find SVI to be correlated with but different from existing proxies of investor attention. In addition, SVI captures investor attention on a more timely basis. SVI allows us to shed new light on how retail investor attention affects the returns to IPO stocks and price momentum strategies. Using retail order execution in SEC Rule 11Ac1-5 reports, we establish a strong and direct link between SVI changes and trading by less sophisticated individual investors. Increased retail attention as measured by SVI during the IPO contributes to the large first-day return and long-run underperformance of IPO stocks. We also document stronger price momentum among stocks with higher levels of SVI, consistent with the explanation of momentum proposed by Daniel, Hirshleifer and Subrahmanyam (1998).HT: Wayne Marr
Da, Engelberg and Gao, 2009, "In search of attention".
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
Cinnabon: the time has come
As you can see above, when Key went on Letterman and teased Kiwis that we now have a Cinnabon (which we still don't), Google Search traffic in New Zealand showed that searches on Cinnabon spiked well above searches on both brands we don't have in New Zealand, like Krispy Kreme, and ones we do have, like McDonald's.
Again, strong evidence of pent up demand. Somebody ought to get on with it.
I'm told that a franchise costs about a million bucks though. Surely setting up a "Cinnabuns" or "Schminnabon's", using one of the reverse-engineered Cinnabon recipes easily found online, would cost less than that.
If somebody uses this analysis and goes on to open a shop in Auckland and not in Christchurch, though, I won't be impressed.
Friday, 18 September 2009
Not surprising, still depressing
Clicking the image should make it bigger. Or, run the search yourself. Red line shows Google searches for "Swayze", with a peak at "A", date of his death. Blue line shows Google searches for "Borlaug", with a peak at "B".
But hey, what's saving a billion lives compared with Red Dawn (still one of the greatest movies ever)?
Monday, 27 April 2009
Nowcasting the Flu?
Google Search Insights provides data on the volume of searches on selected terms, worldwide, updated daily. I've previously played with this data looking for evidence of an "Atlas Moment". Google has specifically played up the potential for this kind of nowcasting to help track flu trends. And this looks to be a bad one.
Let's go to Google Search Insights and see whether there was any increased search volume on influenza in Mexico as this developed. On a 12-month track, we indeed see a huge spike in flu searches, in Mexico, recently.
That's not particularly helpful though. Let's narrow it down to the last month.
We can see that things started to blip up around 22 April. A troll back through Google News shows stories starting to hit the papers around 23 April; one of these points out that Mexican doctors were already then well aware of the outbreak. Mexico issued its public health advisory on 22 April.
Perhaps the problem is that search insights scales to peak intensity and we ought here be using a log scale to avoid dampening out early warnings. Unfortunately, I can't narrow down the search to April prior to 22 April. But there's no upward trend in March.
I see no evidence that search intensity in Mexico increased in the leadup to the influenza outbreak. However, if the mess started in places where folks live in close proximity with swine and chickens then perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the first thing affected folks did wasn't a Google search.
The worldwide search trends are interesting. Mexico does have the highest search intensity, followed by Indonesia, the US, and Canada. Indonesia. Hmm.
Long story short, I can't see any way that folks could have predicted the flu outbreak by having carefully watched search intensity in the leadup to last Wednesday. It would be great if Google could allow some search date operators that could exclude recent traffic: I'd love to see what the chart would look like for April, in Mexico, until 22 April.
Update: NBR points me to a Google Map tracking worldwide cases.
Let's go to Google Search Insights and see whether there was any increased search volume on influenza in Mexico as this developed. On a 12-month track, we indeed see a huge spike in flu searches, in Mexico, recently.
That's not particularly helpful though. Let's narrow it down to the last month.
We can see that things started to blip up around 22 April. A troll back through Google News shows stories starting to hit the papers around 23 April; one of these points out that Mexican doctors were already then well aware of the outbreak. Mexico issued its public health advisory on 22 April.
Perhaps the problem is that search insights scales to peak intensity and we ought here be using a log scale to avoid dampening out early warnings. Unfortunately, I can't narrow down the search to April prior to 22 April. But there's no upward trend in March.
I see no evidence that search intensity in Mexico increased in the leadup to the influenza outbreak. However, if the mess started in places where folks live in close proximity with swine and chickens then perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the first thing affected folks did wasn't a Google search.
The worldwide search trends are interesting. Mexico does have the highest search intensity, followed by Indonesia, the US, and Canada. Indonesia. Hmm.
Long story short, I can't see any way that folks could have predicted the flu outbreak by having carefully watched search intensity in the leadup to last Wednesday. It would be great if Google could allow some search date operators that could exclude recent traffic: I'd love to see what the chart would look like for April, in Mexico, until 22 April.
Update: NBR points me to a Google Map tracking worldwide cases.
Friday, 10 April 2009
Zeitgeist via Google Search Insights
I previously noted that we're likely not in an Atlas Moment. While sales of Atlas Shrugged have skyrocketed with the depression, Google Searches show a similar skyrocketing of searches on Karl Marx.
The search there was pretty basic. Let's expand things a bit. First, a straight-up search comparison on Ayn Rand versus Karl Marx isn't entirely fair. Folks might misspell Rand's name, folks might search on "communism" rather than "Marx", and so on. Let's run a more comprehensive comparison.
For Marx, we'll use all of the following terms: "Das Kapital", "Das Capital", "Communist Manifesto", Marxism, Communism, "Karl Marx", "Carl Marx". For Rand, we'll use: "Atlas Shrugged", Objectivism, "Ayn Rand", "Ann Rand", "The Fountainhead", "Virtue of Selfishness", "John Galt". I think that's a reasonably comprehensive list of terms folks would be looking for, but feel free to try your own variations. If you include only Marx, be sure to run the "-Groucho, -Richard, - "Marx Brothers"" and so on. Here's the link to my search. The blue line below shows Marxism while red shows Objectivism. I've also added in an orange line for searches on recession.
The first thing worth noting is massive seasonality in the Marxism search. Any guesses who shows up more in University courses? The seasonality tracks exactly northern hemisphere summer and winter breaks. Ocular least squares suggests a downward trend for both from 2004 through 2007 followed by an increase for both. Ocular least squares also suggests a lot more comovement between the Marxism search and recession than between Objectivism and recession. It looks to me like the increase in the Marxism searches is greater than that for the Objectivism searches. Compared to Marxism, it really doesn't look like an Objectivist Moment.
Some critiques in the comments at my prior post and over at Marginal Revolution wondered about the relevance of search terms or popularity. I'd of course agree. But some libertarians have suggested that the increased sales of Atlas Shrugged may point to an Objectivist Moment; that's also a popularity measure. I'd worry in book sales that online copies of Marx's works are easily found while online versions of Atlas Shrugged are a bit harder to find. Some also have pointed to university syllabus requirements as biasing things. That ought to be a fixed effect across years: I'd say that the growth in either since 2007 points more to effects of the recession. And of course note that Marx still beats Rand even in the middle of semester breaks.
Now, let's try Keynes versus Rand. The Rand search is as before (in red); Keynes (in blue) includes "Keynes" and "Keynesian" then subtracts anybody else named Keynes that shows up otherwise as common searches. Like Marx, Keynes shows a lot of seasonality tied to university schedules. Ocular least squares suggests a strong downward trend for both through mid 2007, flatlining through mid 2008, then a big increase for both from then. Recession isn't included as it throws out the scale.
Let's focus in on the period since January 2008.
Again, I'd suggest looking at growth rather than levels to identify trends. Ocular Least Squares suggests a baseline for Keynes around 40 and for Rand around 55 through mid 2008. The new baseline looks to be about 60 for Keynes and about 80 for Rand: a bigger absolute increase for Rand, but about the same in percentage terms. This is all pretty rough. If the 14 month old weren't about to wake from his nap, I might try downloading the data and running something more than Ocular Least Squares on it. But the eyeball check suggests that if there were an "Atlas Moment", as compared to a "Keynes Moment", I'd say it ran February of 2009 through mid-March, and is now over.
The search there was pretty basic. Let's expand things a bit. First, a straight-up search comparison on Ayn Rand versus Karl Marx isn't entirely fair. Folks might misspell Rand's name, folks might search on "communism" rather than "Marx", and so on. Let's run a more comprehensive comparison.
For Marx, we'll use all of the following terms: "Das Kapital", "Das Capital", "Communist Manifesto", Marxism, Communism, "Karl Marx", "Carl Marx". For Rand, we'll use: "Atlas Shrugged", Objectivism, "Ayn Rand", "Ann Rand", "The Fountainhead", "Virtue of Selfishness", "John Galt". I think that's a reasonably comprehensive list of terms folks would be looking for, but feel free to try your own variations. If you include only Marx, be sure to run the "-Groucho, -Richard, - "Marx Brothers"" and so on. Here's the link to my search. The blue line below shows Marxism while red shows Objectivism. I've also added in an orange line for searches on recession.
The first thing worth noting is massive seasonality in the Marxism search. Any guesses who shows up more in University courses? The seasonality tracks exactly northern hemisphere summer and winter breaks. Ocular least squares suggests a downward trend for both from 2004 through 2007 followed by an increase for both. Ocular least squares also suggests a lot more comovement between the Marxism search and recession than between Objectivism and recession. It looks to me like the increase in the Marxism searches is greater than that for the Objectivism searches. Compared to Marxism, it really doesn't look like an Objectivist Moment.
Some critiques in the comments at my prior post and over at Marginal Revolution wondered about the relevance of search terms or popularity. I'd of course agree. But some libertarians have suggested that the increased sales of Atlas Shrugged may point to an Objectivist Moment; that's also a popularity measure. I'd worry in book sales that online copies of Marx's works are easily found while online versions of Atlas Shrugged are a bit harder to find. Some also have pointed to university syllabus requirements as biasing things. That ought to be a fixed effect across years: I'd say that the growth in either since 2007 points more to effects of the recession. And of course note that Marx still beats Rand even in the middle of semester breaks.
Now, let's try Keynes versus Rand. The Rand search is as before (in red); Keynes (in blue) includes "Keynes" and "Keynesian" then subtracts anybody else named Keynes that shows up otherwise as common searches. Like Marx, Keynes shows a lot of seasonality tied to university schedules. Ocular least squares suggests a strong downward trend for both through mid 2007, flatlining through mid 2008, then a big increase for both from then. Recession isn't included as it throws out the scale.
Let's focus in on the period since January 2008.
Again, I'd suggest looking at growth rather than levels to identify trends. Ocular Least Squares suggests a baseline for Keynes around 40 and for Rand around 55 through mid 2008. The new baseline looks to be about 60 for Keynes and about 80 for Rand: a bigger absolute increase for Rand, but about the same in percentage terms. This is all pretty rough. If the 14 month old weren't about to wake from his nap, I might try downloading the data and running something more than Ocular Least Squares on it. But the eyeball check suggests that if there were an "Atlas Moment", as compared to a "Keynes Moment", I'd say it ran February of 2009 through mid-March, and is now over.
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
An Atlas moment?
10 April 2009 Note: check updated results here!
Lots of chatter on the libertarian blogs about whether we're in an Atlas moment, how sales of Atlas Shrugged are peaking, and how folks finally might be coming round to rejecting the moochers and embracing their inner Galt.
Here's some fun, courtesy of Google Insights.
"Ayn Rand" versus "Karl Marx"
The two lines show us search trends over the last 12 months on the terms "Ayn Rand" (red) and "Karl Marx" (blue). Scales are normalized as a proportion of all searches, with 100 being the largest number of searches. Marx is by far the more popular search term.
Where are folks most interested in each? Well, Google's Search Insight tells us that too. Maps below show search intensity on Karl Marx (in blue) and on Ayn Rand (in red).
So, in lots of the developing world, we're seeing lots of searches on Marx and very little on Rand. Rand only registers in the Philippines. In the US, Rand beats Marx by a small margin; same in India. In Canada, Marx beats Rand; same in Norway and New Zealand and ... pretty much every country that makes the top ten in searches on Ayn Rand. The green bars show searches for "Atlas Shrugged". Only in the US and India do searches on Rand beat searches on Marx.
Search Insights is powerful enough for us to drill down onto country-specific searches. So, we find in Canada, that Rand beat Marx from mid June 08 through August 08, but Marx wins just about the rest of the time. This one shocked me: the proportion by which Marx beat Rand in Ontario matched that in Alberta. Only in British Columbia, Canada's "loonie left coast", did Rand beat Marx. In Manitoba, ancestral home of Barbara Branden, Rand didn't show up at all.
We can drill down even further. Marx beats Rand by a larger majority in Edmonton than in Calgary; Edmonton is the seat of government and sometimes is disparaged as Redmonton. Turns out it's just a matter of degree.
In book sales, Atlas beats Das Kapital. The paperback edition of Atlas is currently #29 in Books at Amazon; Capital is at #5,213. I'd love to know what the rank movement is since a year ago, but I don't know how to access historical Amazon data. Sales of both certainly seem to be up, but I can't compare trends without a decent handle on base rate sales from a year or two ago.
So, Randians, be a bit careful about calling this a Randian moment. Economic crisis seems to intensify interest in alternatives at both poles, at least as evidenced by Google search trends. You can, of course, object that maybe all the searches on Marx are to find out just how Marxist Obama really is: it's Objectivists doing the searches. There certainly are a lot of searches on Marx + Obama, but I can't evaluate the searchers' normative assessments of any such link. I've tried adding a few disambiguating terms like evil or bad to add to the searches; doesn't seem to affect much. If you can think of better ways of disambiguating, I'd love to see the results!
Other fun searches: Capitalism and Communism are about neck and neck in the search races, with very collinear time series: massively parallel movements since November. And "Objectivism" doesn't garner enough searches to much show up anywhere, at least not in comparison with either capitalism, communism or socialism.
HT: Many thanks to Hal Varian for telling me about Google Search Insights! It's pretty awesome.
Lots of chatter on the libertarian blogs about whether we're in an Atlas moment, how sales of Atlas Shrugged are peaking, and how folks finally might be coming round to rejecting the moochers and embracing their inner Galt.
Here's some fun, courtesy of Google Insights.
"Ayn Rand" versus "Karl Marx"
The two lines show us search trends over the last 12 months on the terms "Ayn Rand" (red) and "Karl Marx" (blue). Scales are normalized as a proportion of all searches, with 100 being the largest number of searches. Marx is by far the more popular search term.
Where are folks most interested in each? Well, Google's Search Insight tells us that too. Maps below show search intensity on Karl Marx (in blue) and on Ayn Rand (in red).
So, in lots of the developing world, we're seeing lots of searches on Marx and very little on Rand. Rand only registers in the Philippines. In the US, Rand beats Marx by a small margin; same in India. In Canada, Marx beats Rand; same in Norway and New Zealand and ... pretty much every country that makes the top ten in searches on Ayn Rand. The green bars show searches for "Atlas Shrugged". Only in the US and India do searches on Rand beat searches on Marx.
Search Insights is powerful enough for us to drill down onto country-specific searches. So, we find in Canada, that Rand beat Marx from mid June 08 through August 08, but Marx wins just about the rest of the time. This one shocked me: the proportion by which Marx beat Rand in Ontario matched that in Alberta. Only in British Columbia, Canada's "loonie left coast", did Rand beat Marx. In Manitoba, ancestral home of Barbara Branden, Rand didn't show up at all.
We can drill down even further. Marx beats Rand by a larger majority in Edmonton than in Calgary; Edmonton is the seat of government and sometimes is disparaged as Redmonton. Turns out it's just a matter of degree.
In book sales, Atlas beats Das Kapital. The paperback edition of Atlas is currently #29 in Books at Amazon; Capital is at #5,213. I'd love to know what the rank movement is since a year ago, but I don't know how to access historical Amazon data. Sales of both certainly seem to be up, but I can't compare trends without a decent handle on base rate sales from a year or two ago.
So, Randians, be a bit careful about calling this a Randian moment. Economic crisis seems to intensify interest in alternatives at both poles, at least as evidenced by Google search trends. You can, of course, object that maybe all the searches on Marx are to find out just how Marxist Obama really is: it's Objectivists doing the searches. There certainly are a lot of searches on Marx + Obama, but I can't evaluate the searchers' normative assessments of any such link. I've tried adding a few disambiguating terms like evil or bad to add to the searches; doesn't seem to affect much. If you can think of better ways of disambiguating, I'd love to see the results!
Other fun searches: Capitalism and Communism are about neck and neck in the search races, with very collinear time series: massively parallel movements since November. And "Objectivism" doesn't garner enough searches to much show up anywhere, at least not in comparison with either capitalism, communism or socialism.
HT: Many thanks to Hal Varian for telling me about Google Search Insights! It's pretty awesome.
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