Are you familiar with Google Trends Explore charts?
Google Trends allows you to see what searches are hot on Google right now. And their Explore feature takes things one step further, allowing you to see how searches on specific terms have been trending over a period of time. Google even creates a cool line graph and allows you to compare multiple terms against each other.
For example,
- Which do people search for more, dog or cat? (It's dog).
- Look at the steady rise of people searching for YouTube after it was creatd in 2005.
- Coke vs. Pepsi! (Coke wins, but something caused searches in Pepsi to spike in June 2006.)
I was doing some research for this site and I started wondering how searches for the word scrapple have trended over time. TO THE GOOGLE TRENDS!
As you would expect, from 2004 to today searches for scrapple are mostly steady. Except there is that one big spike in searches for scrapple in February 2011! What the heck is that all about? Let's see if we can figure it out.
Google, search for me scrapple february 2011. BOOM!
The Dirty Jobs episode where Mike Rowe visits Hughes Delaware Maid Scrapple -- "Scrapple Maker" -- aired on February 1, 2011. The above chart tells me that most of the viewers had no idea what scrapple was and turned to the internet to find out more. But by March, everyone's curiousity had been sated and the daily searches on scrapple returned to normal.
I think it's fascinating that a show like Dirty Jobs can make such an impact on the internet's inquisitiveness in scrapple!
Are there other scrapple-related search trends we should look at?
And for your viewing pleasure, some clips from the scrapple episode of Dirty Jobs:
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