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Aug 13 2008 8:11AM EDT

Fun Geek Pasttime: Google Insights

Kevin Maney notices: Google may not have realized that when it turned on Google Insights in April, it created one of the bestest techie toys of the year. Bloggers, particularly, are messing around with it and finding out some interesting stuff about the Web.

Like, this post from Geekfun shows Twitter's state-by-state growth since its launch in January 2007 to this summer. Interesting (and probably predictable) how the urban/tech states were the first to catch on -- California, of course; and then Washington state, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois.

Futuristic Play used Insights to track a number of Web sites, mapping them out to show how YouTube and MySpace have gone mainstream nationwide, Facebook is more of an East of the Mississippi phenomenon, and fairly new and geeky sites like Netvibes are only getting attention in California.

Searchviews used it to figure out that The New York Times gets the most volume of searches compared to any other U.S. newspaper. USA Today, my old stomping ground, comes in second.

In perhaps the most nerdy example I could find, the P2P Foundation used Insights to see where on earth the most searches for the term P2P come from. And the answer is: China. Why China would do so much searching for P2P is not answered by the blog.

I played around and found out something that seems vaguely disturbing: search volume for my name dropped off about the time I joined Portfolio in early 2007 -- while the volume of searches for Portfolio.com has grown. Yikes.


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