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News trends 2010 (prasad)

Some news items from 2010 compared, using Google Insights/Trends, for the amount of interest they generated. This is the number of searches in google news for each item, normalized in some unclear way. The biggest story of the year, at least of the ones I checked, is Tiger Woods. Woods beat the World Cup and Wikileaks combined. He's twice as big as the iPad, which beats Justin Bieber by a whisker. Global

Healthcare bill and Ground zero mosque generated comparable search and news story volumes. Healthcare generated brief but intense interest in March, while the mosque story had more staying power.

Healthmosque

In the world of outrage, Dr. Laura, Rick Sanchez and Juan Williams all made creditable showings.

Outrageporn

 

Here are all the stories I checked in order of interest. It's descending order all the way through, and the line breaks are quite pretty subjective:
Tiger Woods
iPad, Justin Bieber, Wikileaks
World Cup, LeBron James
Glenn Beck, Haiti Earthquake, Jon Stewart, Healthcare, Gary Coleman
Prince William, Scott Brown, Iceland volcano, Elena Kagan, Rush Limbaugh, Jetblue flight attendant, Corey Haim, Bristol Palin
McChrystal, Arizona immigration, Natalee Holloway
Ground Zero Mosque, Rick Sanchez, Juan Williams, Tyler Clementi
Oil leak, Quran burning
Chile mine

There must be something wrong with the oil-leak search, and I'm surprised how few people searched for the Chilean miners story.

Happy New Year everyone!

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One response to “News trends 2010 (prasad)”

  1. Ruchira

    I am not terribly surprised that people would be searching more assiduously for the dirt on Tiger Woods than the fate of the Chilean miners or the Louisiana oil spill. Two reasons for that: 1)wherever governments become involved in cleaning up a mess, (oil spill, trapped miners) people lose interest partly because they feel it would be taken care of one way or the other without drama. Ditto for healthcare; 2)it is the tabloid driven personal news items like marital problems involving multiple players, outrageous behavior and utterances by public figures and much hyped electronic goods launches that excite the imagination because people can go on having their own opinions on the issue, no matter what the facts are.
    Natalee Holloway on the list in 2010, so many years after her disappearance, would have been a surprise by itself. But Joran van der Sloot, the jerk who is widely thought to have been responsible for her mysterious vanishing got nabbed for the murder of another young woman in the past year.

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