Google Trends

I came across this NYT article  today in my Twitter account .  It’s about Google being able to predict flu trends around the country by analyzing search terms that people are using.  Fascinating. 

This led me to Google Trends, which allows you to look at search terms and see how often they are used geographically.  I was able to drill down to Pennsylvania and then on that results page, I got a listing of cities with indications of how popular the terms were.  Google Trends is updated daily.

However, also on the Google Trends page is something called Hot Trends.  This is updated hourly and lists the top ten on the front page with an option to look at more hot trends.  That second page lists all one hundred of the hot trends.  When you click on a trend, you get graphs and also news stories and blogs about that search term, to help you put it into perspective.

Search tool for Wikipedia

This one comes from BatesTip, an info newsletter that I receive. 

The tool is called Powerset and specifically searches Wikipedia.  It’s especially strong in pulling together information that spans a number of Wikipedia articles.

I used it to search for “ancient Egypt” and got the main wiki article plus a large number of articles that could have taken me along several lines of inquiry.

Granted, Wikipedia is not a reliable source for newspaper articles on its own, but I’ve found it to be invaluable in pointing me towards information that is reliable.