For some reason, I thought it would be interesting to follow “hay fever” through the days of the week. I couldn’t think of another good query to compare it against so I typed the same thing without quotes. The result was quite interesting:
The best time-based trends on Compare Stuff come from phrases that are new:
Let’s do a nice simple time trend for bike vs. car…
Ignoring the sharp upturn for 2007 (this seems to happen quite often - I’m not yet exactly sure why…) bikes seem to be rising slightly faster. Note that you have to have the y-axis starting at zero if you want to compare gradients.
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Major events obviously have a big impact across the web. Here you can see the 2004 Asian tsunami making its mark:
What about all the hype around SARS and avian flu?
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It looks like South America still offers some of that low-budget charm:
A long, long time ago when Compare Stuff was young I made a version which made it easy to do quantitative biomedical literature search analysis. I have now blown away the cobwebs, improved it a little (now you can compare 8 things) and will briefly demonstrate its genius…
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The Guardian is reporting an inquiry into low pay, long hours and poor conditions in clothing factories in India. I don’t spend a lot of time on the high street, but it is plainly obvious that prices have been dropping in the UK for many years (and quality too). Let’s see what the web says:
Well the cheap clothes phenomenon isn’t just my imagination, but it looks like interest in sweatshops and labour conditions has been on the decline for several years. No surprise that the greedy companies took advantage!
Yes it’s true. Richard Dawkins’ one man crusade against all organised religions is actually getting somewhere…
There is not such a clear victory over the Prophet Mohammed, but Buddha is definitely taking a beating.
The “recent years” x-axis selection only gave you the last seven years (2001-2007 at the time of writing) which didn’t let you monitor trends very far back in time. The new “recent (odd) years” choice gives you the last seven odd-numbered years, which obviously go back further. Why do we use the odd years? Well we’re avoiding “2000″ because this text on a web page refers to the actual year much less than, say “2001″.
You can use Compare Stuff to monitor trends in public interest of any topic through time - either by day of the week, recent months or recent years. Here’s a comparison of “gun crime” vs. “serious fraud” over recent years: