Who Cares about the Recession?
December 20th, 2008 by Nick SaintNo one, according to an incredibly unscientific study released by me now. I believe I’ve written about Google Trends before, but if you aren’t familiar with it, you should get familiar. It allows you to see the frequency with which particular words or phrases have appeared in searches and news stories over time. This is a deeply flawed way of measuring interest in a topic, for any number of obvious reasons, but it’s fun, and you learn a lot more than nothing.
So a few hours ago I found myself looking at how the word ‘recession’ was doing. I can only imagine that I was subconciously influenced by the Economist’s R-word Index, which has been around for years, though I’m not aware of having thought about it until afterwards. In any case, here’s the very unsurprising graph for ‘recession’ by itself:
So both journalists and average web-surfers are suddenly much more interested in recessions than they have been in recent years. Nothing surprising in that. But looking at one search term by itself is never that informative, because the raw number of searches is pretty meaningless unless you know a lot about web traffic. So I compared ‘recession’ to a term that represented the weightiest news item of our time: ‘Palin’. Also, to focus on this particular recession, I limited results to the last year. Take a look:
With Palin (the red line) setting the scale, ‘recession’ (the blue line) is basically a flat-line at zero for websearchers, though it has overtaken ‘Palin’ in news items since the election. But maybe this is sensible: presidential elections are very important, and she was, somehow, involved in one. It’s hard to see what’s going on at the far right of that top graph, so maybe - I thought to myself - things will look better if I zoom in:
Not so much. Note that this chart starts after the election was already over. So this isn’t the GOP nominee we’re talking about, it’s the governor of Alaska. You can see a little spike at the beginning of December when the fact that we are in a recession was made official, but Americans quickly got back to Palin business as usual.
I love Palin-reading as much as the next guy, and much more than the next guy if the next guy isn’t Andrew Sullivan, but this really surprised me. Here’s something I found much less surprising:
The blue line is still ‘recession’. The red line is now ‘boobs’. The people want to know. Oddly, the media isn’t biting.
