Trends

I have been playing with the latest gadget from google labs: Google Trends. It seems it appeared last year but it wasn't avalaible to general public until now.

Some of the results are amazing, in science the trends by region are clearly dominated by Asia showing clearly the importance of science in that region. Now let's look at the cities, for the term astrophysics, the searches are concentrated in: Pasadena (home of Caltech), Oxford (UK), Cambridge (UK), Bangalore, Cambridge (USA, home of Harvard and MIT), New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Delhi, all of them in India.

In particle physics Oxford (UK) and Geneva (home of CERN, the biggest particle physics laboratory in the world) clearly dominate the scene with Cambridge(USA) in a distant third place. I couldn't resist to compare the trends in astrophysics and particle physics, and the results show that astrophysics is a bit more popular, but there is a peak in particle physics around mid 2004 when it surpassed astrophysics, I don't know the reason for sure, I speculate it is related to the results of the RHIC.

PD: If you live in Mexico you should find this trends quite interesting. The reason that the red line (the one corresponding to the PRI) don't appears is that the term do not have enough search volume to show graphs! You can even follow the trends of the leading candidates to presidency, the results are fascinating, you can see how the popularity of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador was unbelievably high during the impeachment process but currently he is way below Felipe Calderon, you can even see how Felipe Calderon was completely unknown before 2005 then matched the popularity of Roberto Madrazo and is now in the lead (at least in terms of web presence).