Is Oregon The Place To Be For Trekkers?

[Aike]

I was looking at the Google Trends insights about Star Trek.

And most searches are done in the US. No big surprise. But Star Trek seems to be more popular in the western part of country than in Middle America, the South or on the East Coast.

Here´s the top ten state list:

1, Oregon
2. Washington
3. Utah
4. Oklahoma
5. Alaska
6. Nevada
7. Colorado
8. Missouri
9. New Mexico
10. Idaho

So is it easier to find trekkers in Oregon than anywhere else in the world?

 

[7thsealord]

May not be that many. Could be just one or two severely obsessive-compulsive fans.

 

[Anji]

They haven't been to Chicago, Illinois. We've been the Trek capital of the US since the 1960s.

 

[MacLeod]

I was looking at the Google Trends insights about Star Trek.

And most searches are done in the US. No big surprise. But Star Trek seems to be more popular in the western part of country than in Middle America, the South or on the East Coast.

Here´s the top ten state list:

1, Oregon
2. Washington
3. Utah
4. Oklahoma
5. Alaska
6. Nevada
7. Colorado
8. Missouri
9. New Mexico
10. Idaho

So is it easier to find trekkers in Oregon than anywhere else in the world?

Short answer no, perhaps in the US. But does that take into account population density, etc...

 

[Temis the Vorta]

May not be that many. Could be just one or two severely obsessive-compulsive fans.

And they're probably here. Raise your hands, you two...

They haven't been to Chicago, Illinois. We've been the Trek capital of the US since the 1960s.

WHAT? NO!

Obviously, the Trek capital of the universe is San Francisco.

Kidding aside, here's how Google Insights works.

Google Insights for Search analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you've entered, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. This analysis indicates the likelihood of a random user to search for a particular search term from a certain location at a certain time. Keep in mind that Insights designates a certain threshold of traffic for search terms, so that those with low volume won't appear. Our system also eliminates repeated queries from a single user over a short period of time, so that the level of interest isn't artificially impacted by these type of queries.

Say you've entered the seach term tea, setting your location parameter to Scotland, and your time parameter to March 2007. In order to calculate the popularity of this term among users in Scotland in March of 2007, Insights for Search examines a percentage of all searches for tea within the same time and location parameters. The results are then shown on a graph, plotted on a scale from 0 to 100. The same information is also displayed graphically by the geographic heat map.

So just a couple insane people can't skew the data.

And they do "normalize" the data.

All the results in Google Insights for Search are normalized, which means that we've divided the sets of data by a common variable to cancel out the variable's effect on the data. Doing so allows the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. If we didn't normalize the results and displayed the absolute rankings instead, data from regions generating the most search volume would always be ranked high.

Let's consider the following examples to highlight some of the key points of normalization:

*Canada and Fiji show the same percentages for the term 'hotel.' Does this mean that they have the same amount of search volume for that term?

Just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. Data from these two regions - with significant differences in search volumes - can be compared equally because the data has been normalized by the total traffic from each respective region. So, we can assume that users in both Fiji and Canada are equally likely to search for the term hotel.