I mean, really, people should be cleaning their teeth every day of the week, not just before a big Saturday night out.

I also removed the “powered by Yahoo” icon because Yahoo are not serving it any more. It seems we’re using a deprecated API now, but I guess it will work for a while to come.

And while we are here, I’ll post a graph for old times’ sake:

Happy comparing!

It looks like Saturday Night Fever is pushing the unquoted version up at the weekend. The quoted version shows little change with the day of the week, as you might expect. Although people spend more time outdoors at the weekend, so you might expect some more mentions for Sat/Sun.

Switch off the y-axis zeroing and it all goes crazy (because we’re just amplifying noise):

And now, something slightly more interesting. Let’s look at “dengue fever” and “yellow fever” through time:

And let’s also see if they have different mental effects:

It seems that they do!

Trends of more traditional things are less marked, but perhaps still interesting (I think you should ignore the 2007 blip – I’ve just looked into this in some detail but still can’t figure out why it’s happening for quite a lot of queries – sorry). Is cauliflower cheese showing zero growth compared to more trendy vegetable treatments?

Is pak choi showing a meteoric rise?

Do you have a restaurant and want it to be riding the wave of the latest culinary fashion? Maybe you should run your menu through Compare Stuff to see what’s hot and what’s not.

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.

Let’s look in more detail by using phrases like “bought a car” “cleaned my car” etc.

That’s a lot of graphs to get your head round, but they make sense on the whole. Try some more phrases, like “crashed my car”, “pimped my bike” etc., if you want!

What about all the hype around SARS and avian flu?

The Wikipedia page for sleeping sickness mentions a decline in incidence, and Compare Stuff shows that too:

Malaria seems to be very slightly on the decline, but remember this is a decline in the amount of coverage on the web, not the number of people being infected!

That’s why it’s a good idea to use Compare Stuff to look at the trends of words and phrases that are not likely to follow fashions and whims. Here are the first two phrases that came to mind, and they make a really pretty plot:

I really wouldn’t expect to see a global increase in bad coughs over the period of a few years (around 2005) but maybe this is related to something? Any suggestions? Go on, it would make my day to get a comment!

And finally, this brings us to a brand new x-axis selection – South Asian countries – which should work well because English is widely spoken in those parts:

And in Europe, Spain predictably tops the list of a small set of countries (use the legacy version to compare more).

Note that “expensive hotel” doesn’t always have the opposite trend to “cheap hotel” – a country can have both.

Next, try cities, island resorts… or compare “designer hotel”, “exclusive hotel”, “scruffy hotel”

Or of course whatever you think is interesting or fun.

Note that it still uses the old vertical graph style like the legacy web version, but it’s still quite easy to figure out what’s going on.

With it you can… compare trends in research activity:

Sad, but true, obesity research is on the increase while cancer research is steady or perhaps on the decline.

You can also compare techniques and places:

Or you can compare places with respect to research activity:

Here is looks like Kobe and Osaka are better places to work on diabetes if you thrive on competition and discussion with colleagues.

And that’s only the beginning… you can look at trends across different diseases or types of cancer, different techniques, fields, authors, gene names… in fact anything you can think of (but remember that the numbers of “hits” should be large so that the stats are good).

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!

While we’re at it, let’s have a quick look at government regulation:

I expected a rise in the free market actually. Let’s look at economic inequality a bit more:

Not really what I expected, but maybe it’s just that people don’t care any more.

Finally, remember that you can compare trends for things you really don’t expect to have a real trend. Like this example here. There’s a trend, but it’s the same for both as you might expect!

There is not such a clear victory over the Prophet Mohammed, but Buddha is definitely taking a beating.