Google Trends:The most simple and yet still incredible way to look at trends

With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to fiveGoogle Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.


What it's good for

• compare keywords
• keyword traffic results by region and news stories
• Compare and view popularity of search terms
• Comparison on search terms over time
• Check what terms are being used in google searches
• Allow users to trend out search query volume on Google by period and geography. Also pulls in Google News results
• Google tool to evaluate the popularity of search terms on Google
• The most simple and yet still incredible way to look at trends
• What are people searching for on Google?
• get graphs representing how popular different searches are relative to each other
• What are people googling? And how much of it have they been googling?
• See what search terms people are using most
• compare web site traffic between web sites by country
• compare sites traffic
• Search stats tracking tool

also check out YouTube Trends for the most shared, most viewed on YouTube topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time.

and Google News for top stories trending

Google Flu Trends: explore flu trends around the world

Google Flu Trends: How does this work?
We've found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity. Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate current flu activity around the world in near real-time.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer. You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together. We compared our query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Our results have been published in the journal Nature.

These graphs show historical query-based flu estimates for different countries and regions compared against official influenza surveillance data. As you can see, estimates based on Google search queries about flu are very closely matched to traditional flu activity indicators. Of course, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

So why bother with estimates from aggregated search queries? Traditional flu surveillance is very important, but most health agencies focus on a single country or region and only update their estimates once per week. Google Flu Trends is currently available for a number of countries around the world and is updated every day, providing a complement to these existing systems.

Early detection of a disease outbreak can reduce the number of people affected. If a new strain of influenza virus emerges under certain conditions, a pandemic could ensue with the potential to cause millions of deaths (as happened, for example, in 1918). Our up-to-date influenza estimates may enable public health officials and health professionals to better respond to seasonal epidemics and pandemics.

Download world flu activity data - Animated flu trends for Google Earth - Compare flu trends across regions in Public Data Explorer

American Elements

"American Elements...  has created a useful website for readers seeking information on the chemical elements. The main page presents the periodic table, a simple search window, and links to a few important topics (e.g., nanotechnology, fuel cells, solar energy). Clicking on the abbreviation for an element retrieves a few paragraphs about the element, with key terms highlighted and hyperlinked to other parts of the site. Tabbed sections titled Properties, Safety Data, Products, Research (listing multiple references about the element), Isotopes, and Other Elements at the bottom of the page provide more in-depth information." Choice

HOT TOPICS

A Topical Compilation of Selected American Elements Programs of Interest. The goal of Hot Topics is to bridge the gap between high technology and materials science. In Hot Topics American Elements covers an expanded range of topics that are currently in the news or relevant to either our customers or the public policy debate. Each page provides further summaries and links to related American Elements research and development.

Recommended in the November 2014 issue of Choice.

!Women Art Revolution

!W.A.R.: Voices of a Movement

The artists’ and critics’ interviews presented here chronicle the founding years of the feminist art movement in the 1970s. While focusing on the events of that decade and the following, these narratives also discuss the impact of the civil rights, anti-war, and women’s rights movements.
Created by artist and filmmaker Lynn Hershman Leeson over the last two decades (1990-2008) as she developed her groundbreaking documentary, !Women Art Revolution, this archive provides the first-person histories of the pioneering individuals who challenged the ways in which women were considered by the reigning art establishment. Available from this site are the videos, transcripts, and biographies on the interviewees as well as links to the Women Art Revolution collection finding aid, information on the documentary !Women Art Revolution, and other feminist studies resources.

Recommended in the November 2014 issue of Choice.

Worldwide Governance Indicator

The Worldwide Governance Indicator (WGI) project is the World Bank Group's latest foray into the growing field of empirical research and governance.  WGIs are research data sets that measure quality of governance based on data gathered from a number of survey institutes, think tanks, nongovernmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms.  Based on nearly 40 data sources produced by over 30 organizations worldwide, the project derives ratings on the quality of governance in over 200 countries. 
The Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) project reports aggregate and individual governance indicators for 215 economies over the period 1996–2013, for six dimensions of governance:

• Voice and Accountability
• Political Stability and Absence of Violence
• Government Effectiveness
• Regulatory Quality
• Rule of Law
• Control of Corruption

These aggregate indicators combine the views of a large number of enterprise, citizen and expert survey respondents in industrial and developing countries.  They are based on 32 individual data sources produced by a variety of survey institutes, think tanks, non-governmental organizations, international organizations, and private sector firms.

• Interactive data access
• Description of methodology
• Download full dataset (excel)

Recommended in the November issue of ALA's Choice

Office of the Historian

The Office of the Historian is staffed by professional historians who are experts in the history of U.S. foreign policy and the Department of State and possess unparalleled research experience in classified and unclassified government records. The Office’s historians work closely with other federal government history offices, the academic historical community, and specialists across the globe. The Office is directed by Dr. Stephen Randolph, The Historian of the U.S. Department of State.

"The site contains an electronic version of Foreign Relations of the United States, the official documentary record of major US foreign policy decisions and significant diplomatic activity . . . from 1861 through the Carter presidency. Other sections include the "Department History" which provides a brief history of the department, biographies of the secretaries of state, a list of principal diplomatic officers and chiefs of missions, overseas travels of the last 30 secretaries and presidents since Theodore Roosevelt, and visits to this country by foreign leaders since 1874.  The travels for the secretaries and the presidents are organized in chronological order and by destination - -  The "Key Milestones" section features essays on major points in American diplomatic history - - The "Guide to Countries" section provides an overview of "diplomatic recognition and the establishment and maintenance of diplomatic relations between the United States and states of the world, from 1776 to the present"   - - Finally, "More Resources" offers information on the background of the office; an option to browse collections by people, places, and topic tags; lists of hosted conferences; contact information; an FAQ list; resources for electronic application developers; educational resources; and a link to a web page providing information on the Open Government Initiative." Recommended in the November 2014 issue of Choice.

Mapping Titian

Mapping Titian allows users to visualize one of the most fundamental concerns of the discipline of Art History: the interrelationship between an artwork and its changing historical context.

Focusing on the paintings executed by the Venetian Renaissance artist, Titian (ca. 1488-1576), this site offers a searchable provenance index of his attributed pictures and allows users to create customizable collections of paintings and customizable maps that show the movement of the pictures over time and space with the application of various filters. The collections and maps can be shared with other users or can remain private.

The site also includes a glossary with short biographies of patrons and collectors of Titian’s pictures and references with a selected bibliography of relevant scholarship.

The main goal of Mapping Titian is to create a tool from which new research, discoveries, and experiences can be inspired, guided, and shared. The site user is conceived of as a site thinker.

Recommended in the November 2014 issue of Choice.

The Best Commencement Speeches Ever

For this website, NPR personnel selected over 300 commencement speeches dating back to 1774 on a variety of themes, including Work Hard, Be Kind, Embrace Failure, and Dream. Users may search by name, school, or year; or select a theme tab under the search box, which the Choice reviewer found to be the easiest method for locating speeches. The site offers photographs or other illustrations of the speakers, texts of the speeches, and, in some cases, a video of the speech so that users may analyze the presenter's speaking style. Speakers include celebrities Lisa Kudrow and Oprah Winfrey, Presidents Ronald Reagan and John F. Kennedy, coach Bobby Knight, and inspirational leaders like Mother Teresa. Many of the links lead to other sites, such as "Graduation  Wisdom  graduationwisdom.com/,  open the door to even more speeches. The "quote image" of the person, a quotation from the speech, and a link to the speech may be shared via e-mail, Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Although similar sites may be found using various search engines, this website is more selective than most. It would make a good addition to speech class syllabi in high schools and colleges".

Recommended in November 2014 issue of Choice by J. J. Turner, Auraria Library.