iSixSigma.com blogger Andrew Downard posts an interesting rundown on "Six Sigma Trends in Google," here.
The blog posting discusses a newish tool that Google makes available at http://www.google.com/trends, which allows you to look at search term trends.
To try it out, I plugged in "outsourcing" and "American Idol." (I figured the latter would be a good gauge of the true popularity of outsourcing as a search term. You can see the results here.
Here’s what I learned.
People in India perform many more searches on "outsourcing" than we do here in the states. Same with the Philippines. Makes sense. Livelihood issues rule. But even Colombia beats out the US with its interest in the topic.
On the other hand, "American Idol" shows up more in US cities. Interestingly, Washington, D.C. is the top city listed for that. (I interpret that to mean that politicians are always looking for good advice on making the cut.) And actually, when you plug in "outsourcing" without "American Idol," D.C. is the top city in the US listed for that too. So perhaps it simply means that federal workers have more time to surf than the rest of us.
The top language for "outsourcing" is English, followed by Danish, then Spanish and Polish. (Perhaps it’s time to hire a service provider to do some translation work for our site…)
The tool allows you to choose a particular year to home in on, as well as region. And although the frivolous search I’m performing doesn’t show many spikes for "outsourcing," and a multitude of them for "American Idol," when you list only "outsourcing" and examine that search volume, you’ll see several spikes — particularly around the Spring of 2004, when it was a major point of debate going into the primaries for the presidential election.
What’s this all lead me to conclude? Outsourcing is one of those topics that those of us living in the US consider our own. After all, it’s our job losses. It’s our companies shrinking to go overseas. Right? Maybe not. The data doesn’t lie. Maybe all those people in all those other countries seeking out information about outsourcing through Google are hungrier than we are to know how to get ahead.
That, and the world apparently loves Carrie Underwood. The search spikes behind her victory make the other searches else look like they’re flatlining.
