Information Research Weblog

Some news out, while I've been away, about new developments at Google. Most of the goodies provided seem to me to be little more than candy for the nerds and I wouldn't dream of cluttering up my screen with them. However, one, Google Trends, is rather interesting from the point of view of the information scientist.

Trends gives you graphical information on the use of search terms and phrases and also shows the cities, regions and languages of the searcher.

Put "knowledge management" into the search box and up pops a graph showing the decline in use of this phrase as a search term, along with bar charts for the Cities, Regions and Languages. Unfortunately no scales are provided, so we have no idea of the quantities involved - is the trend starting from several million searches or 10,000?

Whatever the answer to that question may be, however, the list of Cities, etc., confirms my intuition, derived from looking at search outputs myself and also seeing papers on the subject, that the interest in km comes mainly from the Far East. Quite why that should be so, I don't know, but with the USA and the UK figuring not at all, it does make one wonder about the continuing hype on the subject.

Removing the quotation marks and using simply knowledge management, which Google's engine translates into knowledge AND management doesn't make an awful lot of difference to the output, except that news items are now recorded.

Put a comma between two search terms and you get a graph comparing the two - for example, "knowledge management", "information management". As you see, information management has also declined, but not to the same extent.

Try information management on its own and a picture emerges

of interest from India, the USA and Australia and the UK creeps on to the Regions list in 10th position.

If the other new features of Google are for the nerds, I guess that this one is candy for the information scientist :-)