Who Cares About Sex, Money and Personal Finance? What Google Trends Are Telling Us

by Silicon Valley Blogger on 2007-04-159

Here’s something a little different. I found some of this information pretty intriguing: I’m not quite sure how accurate Google Trends is at this time, but check out some of the data it has yielded. Note that this tool is used to show the most popularly searched terms from the beginning of 2004 to now.

Like many other curiosity seekers, I checked Google Trends for the most commonly searched titillating key words that we use out there: “sex”, “money”, “personal finance” and “business” to see where in the world these key terms are HOT.

Here’s what you’ll find. Some funky findings: the Philippines overwhelmingly tops the interest in keyword searches for “love” (no surprise that the “ILOVEYOU” computer virus stemmed from there) , while New Zealand cares about their “sheep”, and weirdly, Trinidad and Tobago is REALLY concerned about “global warming” AND “makeup.” I don’t quite know what to make of some of this, actually. How much could these results be in question?

Here are some more visuals:

SEX

Google Trends for Sex

 

MONEY

Google Trends for Money

 
and similarly for

PERSONAL FINANCE

Google Trends for Finance

 

Now as far as money, personal finance and business goes, the same group of locations seem to rank repeatedly as the top ranked locations for these Google search terms. Not much divergence there. But despite all that info, my readership statistics show that the overwhelming majority of my audience is still from the United States. So I’m wondering how to reconcile such data. Then again, if you searched for “money blog” or “finance blog”, the results are different but may be closer to what I had expected (though still not quite).

Country Share readership stats

Yet a few more things to make me scratch my head.

Copyright © 2007 The Digerati Life. All Rights Reserved.

{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }

Moneymonk April 16, 2007 at 1:39 pm

Wow! I see Pakistan likes SEX alot. The U.S. did not seem to top anything. We seem to be neutral all around

Silicon Valley Blogger April 16, 2007 at 8:25 pm

I find the results a little odd though eye-opening. Can’t explain the trends though…

Tina Anderson February 14, 2008 at 1:09 pm

I’m surprised that the U.S. didn’t top all three of those charts, especially money.

Nino Gonzales October 5, 2008 at 8:52 pm

I did a “study” on philippine culture using google trends… it might interest you… Check it here.

Ed: Cool! Salamat Nino — maganda ata itong ginawa mo rito 😉 .

Savva January 3, 2009 at 3:13 pm

I’m surprised that the U.S. didn’t top all three of those charts, especially money.

Google Money May 18, 2009 at 11:43 pm

Yeah, I was expecting the US to obliterate everything, except for 409. Nigeria has that one I’ll bet. 😀

Chuck The Water Damage Guy June 19, 2009 at 7:17 pm

I’ve played with this before, it seems that repressive Muslim country’s always rank high for sex and homosexuality.

SD September 7, 2010 at 7:18 am

Yeah, people don’t care about sex and money — I think that this kind of themes will have popularity every day.

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