The Web Seer & 2012
An amazing new data visualization tool called “The Web Seer” allows you to visually compare output from Google’s new “suggest” feature, providing fascinating insights into what people are searching for.
To the unfamiliar, Google recently unveiled Google Suggest, an add-on to their search technology that makes smart suggestions as to how to finish your search, using other users’ searches as inputs. Start typing “Washington” and suggestions range from “Washington Post” to “Washington State University.”
Many web surfers have noted Google Suggest’s power not just as a productivity enhancer, but also as an insightful peek into the zeitgeist of the internet, quite often with hilarious results (see http://autocompleteme.com/ for more).
The Web Seer takes the results of Google Suggest and visualizes them as a series of arrows protruding from the root term, in which the size of the arrow is a function of how many results that particular search query returns.
The most interesting wrinkle of The Web Seer, however, is that it allows you to compare and contrast two different search roots, revealing overlapping search trends. This description takes you through some revealing comparisons. For example, they show the overlap between suggestions for the roots “is my daughter” and “is my son” in which we see “depression” and “gifted” as common suggestions, but “on drugs” isolated to son queries and “pregnant” rightfully linked only to daughter queries.
Naturally, my own experiments turned to politics. To maximize the number of applicable results I used the most buzzed about Republican possibilities for the 2012 presidential primary, and, because of our previous work with Mitt Romney’s campaign, I used him as the root comparison.
Apparently, when it comes to these candidates, we are all wondering a few key things: are they running for president, are they conservative, are they a Republican, and of course, are they a freemason. But even beyond that, there is just a wealth of insight here. I’ll let those other results speak for themselves in the screen-captures below.
- Alex Lundry
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