Of the online searchers who Google the terms "Philippines" and "Thailand," those who look for the former tend to be Filipinos, while a greater percentage of those who search for the latter are very likely non-Thais. My source? Google Trends.
If you look at the graph carefully, you'll see that those searching for "Thailand" are slightly more than those looking for "Philippines," except for one point when the gap widened dramatically. To find out what the reason was, Google Trends provides links to webpages that provide some background on certain points on the graph. Check out the image below.
But the proof for my assertion in the first paragraph may be seen in the difference between the two tables below. The first is a search for "Philippines" and "Thailand," while the second is for "Thailand" and "Philippines" (yes, the order of terms matters on search engines). The first table shows that most of those looking up the term "Philippines" come from cities in the Philippines, while the second lists only one city in Thailand among ten cities where the term "Thailand" was Googled.
What does this mean? I'll be writing about the implications in my next post. In the meantime, learn more "About Google Trends," check out Micro Persuasion's "25 Things I Learned on Google Trends" (e.g., Google is more popular than God), and see ResearchBuzz's comparison of searches for "Clay Aiken" and "Taylor Hicks." And don't forget Pinoy Tech Blog's "Google reveals what Pinoys are fond of…" (i.e., "friendster," "call center," "gay sex").
It's a Google Labs product, so this means it's not quite ready for prime time, but it's going to be useful for getting an idea of what people are interested in all over the world at certain points in time and what, if anything, triggered their searches.
Category: Internet
Google Trends
