Re: This stuff is crazy--please go through the question

Answer to MadSci Question about time series using Google data

Question: This stuff is crazy--please go through the question
From: vijaypura
Grade: grad (non-science)
City: bangalore, State/Prov.: karnataka Country: INDIA
Area: Computer Science Message ID Number: 1247894176.Cs

This is about the google search engine-one can create trends in english phrases with reference to different point of time in future, for example I created a phrase "Millions","Perish","Floods","Jan","2009"-I varied the date - number of records fetched peaked during-may,aug & dec 2010.2011,2013 & 2014 fetched minimum records.I checked it with my known marriage dates, where people have not even used internet-it tallies.Here we are actually creating a time-series for occurance of phrases.Is it just random or coincidence or what is it?You too can try it before answering this question.

So when I tried your first query "Millions Perish Floods Jan 2009", Google returned 1,320,000 entries. When I tried "Millions Perish Floods May 2010", Google returns 531,000 entries. The numbers change as the date is changed, until "Millions Perish Floods Dec 2014" returns 18,100 entries.

Unfortunately for would be prognosticators, this effect just comes from the fact that humans like to think about the future, but as you move farther in the future, fewer people have written comments/blog entries/tweets about the date.

In fact, many of these pages (as might be expected) are blog entries about people discussing possible apocolyptic futures. People love to scare themselves, and as we get older one of the scariest things imaginable is some enormous planetary event like an asteroid collision that would topple entire civiliations.

Fortunately, just because people discuss such things does not mean that they will happen. It is important to work on the problems the world faces that we can do something about.

So to answer your question, the results that you noted are most definitely not purely random: they are an artifact of the way that humanity tries to make sense of the world. But that does not mean that you should try to use these results to predict future events!

Mark Huber