I don’t know how this keeps happening but there is always some neat tool or new feature that the folks over at Google roll out and completely blows me away! This time it is their tool out of the labs called Google Correlate. I’ve only just seen this (thanks to my buddy Homer Wolfe for posting on Facebook) and I’m already floored.
What I can gather is this lets you see how certain search terms are correlated over time, or location, or many other variables that I’m still exploring. The first example that I saw as a search term for Stalin (as in Joseph Stalin). As it turns out, no one searches for Stalin in the summer….weird right?!?!
Frequency of search terms for "Stalin"
As if this wansn’t enough to blow me away you can click on the link ‘Search by Drawing’ (http://correlate.googlelabs.com/draw) and pick to draw in your own frequency pattern and it will return a series of search terms that look like what you’ve drawn and tell you how correlated it is.
So I drew this:
What I drew (Something that peaks every couple of years
The correlation result
Really cool tool that gives all kinds of intuitive ways to search their search data! Since particle physics people are usually pretty geeky when it comes to how to search data I thought this would be a tool many people would like to play with!
Imagine the different implications to how searches could be done with this sort of manipulation of data at a visual and intuitive level. Now granted, most of the searches that go on in particle physics are of this sort (looking for bumps or strong correlation in the data) but the tools that Google is making to allow this to be more intuitive is really remarkable!
