How to

A while back, I happened on Google Trends and at the time, I thought it might be a pretty useful tool for analyzing trends.  Unfortunately, it seemed like every search I entered had a downward trend, which led me to believe that maybe there was some downward bias.  Something like, as the volume of searches increased, the relative volume of a particular search might decrease simply because people were searching for a wider variety of things.  If that were the case, then an upward trend might be particularly meaningful, while a downward trend might not be meaningful at all.

Anyway, today it popped into my head to see what kind of trend there might be for the phrase "how to feel good."  Here's the graph (you need to have javascript enabled to see it, or go here):


I suppose there are a lot of ways to interpret this, and perhaps I'll delve further into it sometime. I am particularly curious about the big spike around 2005, reaching a level of 69 which the chart doesn't reach again until 2010.  Any thoughts?  Anybody?  Bueller?

Well, I proceeded to try a lot of "how to" searches, and was surprised to see that people are apparently looking more and more for how to do most anything.  So, either we're getting smarter and realizing we don't know everything, or, we actually don't know and can't figure out how to do much of anything on our own.  It's just easier to ask someone else.

Then, it occurred to me to just try "how to" and see what the most popular "how to" searches were.  It was a little depressing.



Again, I suppose there could be a good explanation for these results, but it seems we're most concerned with how to use iTunes, Gmail, MySpace, and Minecraft, rather than how to do anything useful other than entertain ourselves.  Well, okay.  How to kiss and how to draw are, perhaps, useful.  I probably should have known this was true based on the Hot Searches page, which is usually full of sports and entertainment related searches.  We don't really want to know how to do stuff; we just want to know what other people are doing.

We're number 1!

International rankings of the United States

I'm just going to pick a few of these rankings to comment on:

Index of Democracy: 17 out of 167

Yeah, that's got to be a typo or something.

Life Expectancy: 49 out of 224
And it's likely to get worse .  But, there is some good news in the American medical arena.

Global Competitiveness Report: 4 out of 131
We were #1 until recently.  Good thing we're teaching our kids to not be some darned competitive!

Unfortunately, we only rank #1 in one area: Patents.  But, sadly, there seems to be growing sentiment against patent and copyright protections.  I do have to agree with one point in this link, and that is that our current system is broken.  But that doesn't mean we should eliminate protection altogether.  I'm just not really seeing the argument that the author makes that somehow, innovation and creation will continue, or even increase.  Why would anybody spend the time and resources to make something worthwhile only to have someone else profit from the idea without doing the work?