Google Trends: Bike Commuting
I enjoy playing around with Google Trends. For the uninitiated, Google Trends is a tool that allows you to analyze search terms and track their popularity over time. From Google:
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.
I recently ran a Google Trends search on “Bike Commuting”. You can view the results by clicking here. It’s interesting to see the geographic breakdown as well as the timeline (I’m not surprised Portland topped the list). Notice the bump in mid-2008? That’s when gas prices went over $4 per gallon and buses and trains all over the country were overflowing with bikes. Also notice the drop-off during the winter months. Apparently we’re still mostly fair weather bike riders!
For fun, here’s one more for you: [click here].
5 Responses to “Google Trends: Bike Commuting”
Pleasonton, California is #5. There’s not that many people in Pleasanton (67,000) compared to the rest of the SF Bay Area (where Pleasanton is). I suspect that since Google uses IP addresses to determine locations, looking at specific cities is not completely accurate. I live in Berkeley, and often my automated location on web sites is elsewhere in the Bay Area (I can’t remember the city). I suspect that my DSL connection is “registered” as being in a city other than Berkeley, perhaps the main “router” for all the DSL customers in the area.
Or if you want to see what kind of sub-sub culture bike commuters are (or how little they use Google), check this out: http://www.google.com/trends?q=bike+commuting,bike+touring,+bike+racing&date=all&geo=usa&ctab=0&sort=0&sa=N
I like using Google Trends to compare different searches, e.g. this.
…or for those who continue to wonder why bike companies seem to spend all of their marketing dollars on race bikes, compare Lance Armstrong & bike commuting.
The New York Times had an article
about the Google Books NGrams Viewer which is like Google trends exept that it cover books written in the last 200 years.
A couple of trends I found are interesting railroad,automobile,airplane&bicycle
and the words distant,region,local
are unusually linear.