There are posts on Read/Write Web and Techcrunch about Google Trends giving odd results. Alison (my girlfriend) may have cracked the case – it’s NY Times Crossword fans cheating on the crossword. I wish I had figured this out. Awesome.

This is hilarious. There are a lot of speculative articles about the new Google Trends feature and how it could innovate trend-spotting. So I went and looked at the list of today’s 100 .

It’s funny because as I looked at it, I started to realize that most of these entries are actually crossword puzzle clues. So to check, I looked at today’s NYtimes crossword and saw at least one clue from today’s puzzle was in the results (#97 on google’s list) and the one’s that are further up the list that look like clues (#s 35, 44, 51, 53, 71, etc) are probably from yesterday’s, hence their being more popular. Which makes me wonder about the validity of using these results to detect trends. Say someone sees #97, peter pan pirate, doesn’t realize that it was in the times crossword today, and then assumes there’s a pirate trend in the offing. It just goes to prove you cannot use a mathematical approach to predict trends. That or data without context is irrelevant…

Thought it would be interesting blog fodder…

Data is not the same thing as information.