Friday, February 1, 2008

Confusing Web Trends

I am puzzled. I discovered Google Trends a while back and I have the Gadget on my Google home page. I look at it from time to time in the hope that I will find something interesting going on in the tubes. I haven't yet.

At this moment in time, the top two search trends are for "amuse bouche" and "i sound my barbaric yawp". And Trends claims that these searches are related somehow.

I know what an amuse bouche is only because I am a foodie. It means to amuse the mouth in French and is a kind of very small titillating appetizer.

I know the phrase "I sound my barbaric yawp" only because Dead Poet's Society is one of my favorite movies. This is a Walt Whitman quote that Robin Williams' character uses to break his students out of their shells.

What they have in common is... Nothing. Nothing at all.

This must be an experiment (possibly by aliens, but more likely by a sadistic developer over at Google) to see what happens when people notice.

I would be sad if it just turns out that Google Trends has a monster bug in how they determine that trends are related. It is more fun to think that they might be somehow.

But how, darn it?

I don't know and seemingly neither does Google.

David

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It was probably related to some game show question or something...

David said...

Probably. Although if it was, there was no hint of it on the web anywhere. Not that I could find.

David

Anonymous said...

Why, both touch on the mouth!

The amuse douche titilates and etc.s the mouth like you said, and the Yawp comes forth from the mouth -- and is to my mind fun to say as well. Yep, they're both some simple mouth fun, and that's what they have in common.

Jeff Carlson said...

I did a search on Google Trends for amuse bouche and I got a GREAT link... "Amuse-bouche: Apocalypse now?"

Something to eat at the end of the world. Google Trends is awesome.

David said...

Earlier today the volcanically hot trend search was "baby diaper mustache". Don't be curious like I was...

David