Google Zeitgeist 2013

Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by nettletea on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @09:21AM (#6921186)

You seriously mean to tell me that the most popular search on Google for 2013 is 'Paul Walker' followed by 'iPhone 5s'? What? Surely 'Weather' would be higher. I simply don't know what I'm looking at here.

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Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by chaz on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @09:52AM (#6921363)

It's actually "Top 100 [Trending] Searches." They could have been more clear about that.

http://www.google.com/trends/topcharts?date=2013

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Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by boomzilla on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @03:48PM (#6923836)

Yes, it's trending searches, not most popular ones. By the way, non-engineers/non-analytical people usually have trouble differentiating the two. I can't recall how many meetings with product/business people that I have to explain the concepts.

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Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by aroch on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @09:30AM (#6921247)

Fairly sure they've filtered out what might constitute "low importance" searched like terms such as 'weather'. Searches for the weather probably remain relatively stable and don't really tell us anything.

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Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by fvrghl on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @11:25AM (#6921943)

I also wondered why the death of Paul Walker was in the video. Surely Lou Reed was more influential, yet his death wasn't mentioned.

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Re:Google Zeitgeist 2013 by chimeracoder on Tuesday December 17, 2013 @10:38AM (#6921654)

I imagine this is a variant of a Latent Dirichlet Allocation[0]. Informally, this will identify words "most associated" with 2013, which is not the same thing as the most searched words in 2013.

Put another way, unless there's a huge spike of interest in the weather in 2013 compared to other years, "weather" won't be included.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latent_dirichlet_allocation

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