Just because, I ran a few comparative trend searches on Google Trends again. For example:

Google Trends: water, fire, air, earth

Turns out people are searching the most for air, then water, then fire, then finally earth. Water is hogging a lot of the news coverage, while sturdy old earth gets almost no print.

For you Red Hot Chili Pepper fans who’ve been wondering, sex is way more popular than blood, sugar, or magik.

Video poker gets more searches than Megabucks, but is never in the news. For some reason, Croatian is the top language for “video poker.” Maybe Google needs to work a few kinks out of this?

Heaven is consistently the more popular search term, but hell is in the news more. Similar for God and the Devil.

Life is more popular than death, both in search and news volume.

Finally, goodbye is slightly more newsworthy, but more people want to say hello.

Having plumbed the depths of metaphysics from my desktop, I’ll quit while I’m ahead.

A new Google Trends feature is available, and I quickly decided to use it to see which is most popular on the Internet: sex, gambling, or financial info? So I entered the search string “porn, gambling, stocks.” Here is the result:
Google Trends: porn, gambling, stocks

If you don’t want to click over, I’ll give you a summary. “Porn” is, far and away, more searched for than either “gambling” or “stocks.” More news is generated about stocks than gambling or porn (a distant third place). Australia is leading the pack in “regions” searching for porn and gambling, while the US and India are more likely to look for stocks. The top porn city is Manchester, UK; for stocks is Delhi, India (though it’s still about 1/20 the volume of porn), and Chicago is the gambling leader.

Further, using this feature, I’ve found that Bellagio and Wynn are just about neck-and-neck in most regions in search volume. But searching for “Circus Circus” and “Wynn Las Vegas” I found something interesting. Despite a Wynn surge in late 2004, they are currently running pretty close in search volume.

Turning to Atlantic City, I found that Borgata is way more popular a search term than “Trump Taj Mahal.” Also, while the news coverage of Borgata has had a few spikes, there’s been no discernable coverage of the Taj, at least by Google’s measure. I find it interesting that people in Atlantic City and Pleasantville are searching more than anyone else for Borgata.

Finally, if you want an index of which games people are looking for, it breaks down like this: poker is far, far in the lead, followed by blackjack, roulette, and craps. It’s not even a contest.