Google Trends: Hayley Westenra searches

[Jono]

Hey all,

Just wondering if anyone has checked out Google trends before. Click Here

The stats are quite interesting. You can see information on when the peaks were in searches for her, and what countries the most activity were from. Interesting to note that NZ is the top country overall, and also is within the last year...but within the last month the most traffic comes from Taiwan! Also so far this year (2009) the most comes from Taiwan, followed by Hong Kong, then New Zealand.

If these are reliable stats, would they suggest that Hayley should pay more attention to these areas? Going by all available years the top 5 are NZ, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore, and Malaysia, respectively.

The United Kingdom has much much more population than all of these countries, has less activity, yet seems to get way more attention. Am I reading into this wrongly somehow? I know Google Trends isn't going to be representative of everyone, especially those without internet access...but it is at least an indication of geographical popularity, isn't it?

(BTW, UK is 6th overall)

Jono

P.S. Sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere.

EDIT: You can also go to advanced search, which is quite interesting. Even has a world map!

[pjrcorreia]

Hi Jono,

That is very interesting, I've never heard of Google Trends before, it's great the things I learn here at the Forum!

Best wishes,
Paulo Correia

[martindn]

Hi Paulo,

Well, there is on old song that goes

"You don't know what you've got, until you lose it".

Martin

[Jono]

Jul 26, 2009 22:25:03 GMT martindn said:

Well, there is on old song that goes

"You don't know what you've got, until you lose it".

Martin,

I can see where you are coming from on this. Interesting point, I wonder if that is true in this case? I can tell I'm not going to get much UK support in the way I am looking at this...

Jono

Another way of looking at it is that she should pay more attention to promoting in the countries which don't have as much google activity.... or you could argue that she could potentially do better in the places which seem to show more interest... It's a tricky one. That's all assuming these stats mean something.

[Jono]

I have some good news for you UK fans who feel threatened by these statistics. It seems that the country/ city stats are proportioned according to the number of overall searches.

14. How does counting and ranking of the top regions, cities, and languages work, and are they scaled differently?

To rank the top regions, cities, or languages, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the areas or languages from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities’ ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.

Even though it is talking about "cities", I assume this is also how they calculate the country wide searches. This effectively makes them per-capita stats. It wouldn't be an exact per-capita analysis though, it is exactly what it says, the proportion of overall searches in each country that are "Hayley Westenra", and then comparing that proportion between countries.

So yeah...now all I can say is that these countries seem to have more interest in Hayley, but there aren't necessarily (and probably not) more fans in those countries. Hope this makes sense!

[Libby]

This isn't about searching directly for Hayley Westenra, but about a search that directs people to Hayley!

Today, I did a search on "Ave Maria Franz Schubert lyrics" because I was looking for the translation (and I'm a bit confused on which lyrics belong to it), and several of the results, right near the top, specifically directed me to the lyrics by Hayley Westenra! There were 5 different lyrics site links that mentioned Hayley! So, anybody who searches for these lyrics will see Hayley's name, and might decide to check her out!
Have a look [url=http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ave+maria+franz+schubert+lyrics&aq=6&oq=Ave+Maria+Fran&aqi=g10[/url] here [/url].

None of those sites actually had translations, though.
By the way, why is it that some places say the lyrics to this version are "Ave Maria, Vergin del ciel..." (including Hayley's version), but others list the same lyrics as the Bach/Gounod version?

Edit by Joe...tried to fix broken link (the + signs especially) but couldn't so I just hid it.

[Richard]

Hello Libby and Joe!

If a url includes + signs or other symbols that break the link, use the hyperlink tags like this:

www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ave+maria+franz+schubert+lyrics&aq=6&oq=Ave+Maria+Fran&aqi=g10

Result: www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=ave+maria+franz+schubert+lyrics&aq=6&oq=Ave+Maria+Fran&aqi=g10

Best Wishes,

Richard

[Libby]

Okay, thanks.