Google Trends and Usability
While browsing on Google today I discovered that they had just launched a new service called Google Trends. Apparently you can use this service to “see” what the world is searching for. Actually this is kind of misleading as you have to give it a query first. It will then show you some graphs and statistics on how often the rest of the world searches for this query and as far as I can see it also tries to link peaks in the search frequency to specific webpages/stories.
I of cause immediately tried to see the state of “usability”:
There is really not much help on how to read and understand the user interface so I don’t know what they mean by “Languages”, but what struck me was of cause that when I queried for “usability” my own language, Danish came out on top:
Technorati Tags: Google Trends, denmark, danish, languages, usability
May 12th, 2006 at 18:28 (GMT-1)
Not sure how google trends work, but maybe Denmark could thank Jacob Nielsen for that #1.
I could imagine that searching for Jacob Nielsen would return alot of sites containing the word “Danish”.
May 12th, 2006 at 20:51 (GMT-1)
I know nothing of the algorithms behind it. Even if Martin G’s theory about Jakob Nielsen is true, it sure doesn’t explain Finland being number two.
Another funny thing about this is that “usability” is often translated into Danish “brugervenlighed”
May 15th, 2006 at 12:16 (GMT-1)
Hmm, well they must read your blog or have realised what the issue is because the word “normalized” has appeared since your screenshot. Clicking on this gets you to a FAQ page, which explains it. Paraphrased, it would appear that more people search for usability on the Danish version of Google than on the Google network as a whole.
March 25th, 2009 at 00:29 (GMT-1)
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