"Google Trends" Rocks

In a previous post, I quoted Business Week, "Run a Google geographical-hit query, and you'll see that, per capita, nowhere in the world are there more searches for the words "Peter Drucker," the late management guru, than in Bogotá. No. 2? Medellín."

After reading the Business Week article, I tried to figure out how it ran the "geographical-hit query" on Google, and couldn't find the right website. Searching for "geographical-hit query" didn't help.

To the rescue comes Tim Worstall, who had a recent post on Spanx Undergarments, and revealed the mystery: "Google Trends," which reports the highest concentration of Google searches on a particular word or phrase by city, country and language, and tracks search traffic over time. Here are some interesting search results using Google Trends.

Top 5 Countries for Monica Lewinsky Google searches:

1. Pakistan

2. U.S.

3. India

4. UAE

5. Canada

Top 5 Countries for Milton Friedman Google searches (see trend chart above):

1. Ecuador

2. Bolivia

3. Colombia

4. Hong Kong

5. Mexico

Top 5 Countries for Aretha Franklin searches:
1. Croatia
2. Belgium
3. Chile
4. Italy
5. Norway

Top 5 Countries for "affirmative action" searches:
1. Namibia
2. South Africa
3. U.S.
4. Kenya
5. Australia

If you find other interesting results, let me know and I'll post them.