HN Explorer

80 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 155 ms ] thread
notintokyo
How is this so fast? I thought to compare charts like these you have to slide every chart over every offset to get the best match?
danvk
(I work on correlate)

The gist of why this is so fast is:

1. For the vast majority of queries, we only need to compare hashes of the time series, not the time series themselves.

2. We make no attempt to detect shifted correlations. The correlations you see are all synchronized in time.

knowtheory
Well. That doesn't work on an iPad.
javanix
Ok, that is way too addicting to visit during work hours.

I drew a standard bell-curve peaking in 2007 and then trailing off to zero into 2011 and everything was either Myspace searches or Washington Mutual credit searches.

Pretty nifty.

ayanb
From the whitepaper

"Google Correlate employs a novel approximate nearest neighbor (ANN) algorithm over millions of candidate queries in an online search tree to produce results similar to the batch-based approach employed by Google Flu Trends but in a fraction of a second."

--

zerostar07
Good, so i dont have to worry i m bringing google down / google is going to put a cap on this
judofyr
http://d.pr/VHnF

Makes me wonder if web developers finally switched to full SSL, or if browsers stopped showing the error…

clistctrl
This is seriously an awesome proof of technology, but what is a practical purpose for it?
danberger
Apart from just being able to search by drawing (cool concept in it of itself), the practical purpose would obviously be the reverse: looking at the graph of any search query. But obviously they will never release that :)
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
pud
The "comic book" link on Correlate is awesome. More sites should have documentation like this. http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/comic
danberger
Regarding the Google Flu trend, a Wired magazine article talked about how Google could identify the location of flu outbreaks before the CDC could solely because of search (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/06/ff_sergeys_search/all/...)

In epidemiology, this is known as syndromic surveillance, and it usually involves checking drugstores for purchases of cold medicines, doctor’s offices for diagnoses, and so forth. But because acquiring timely data can be difficult, syndromic surveillance has always worked better in theory than in practice. By looking at search queries, though, Google researchers were able to analyze data in near real time. Indeed, Flu Trends can point to a potential flu outbreak two weeks faster than the CDC’s conventional methods, with comparable accuracy.

TomGullen
Very cool but quite useless. I guess you might be able to spot emerging trends if you spent a bit of time on it though.
fsniper
It's not useless. It has real world academic use cases where researchers need data which might be related. It's also documented in the comic book of this service. Also this is a service becoming real because of a real world problem.
TomGullen
It's useful yes but the usefulness is derived from the data not people drawing lines on a screen! I don't think the drawing a line on a screen allows for much more data discovery .
fsniper
Yes sure. But it can be used by dataset input too.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
lhnz
Interesting to see what is dying: English Chinese Dictionaries, radio stations, Altavista, lyrics, text messaging, Flash.

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:deVob01-p...

And look what's getting more popular: Porn video sites, video sites, Facebook, Mac computers and how to work them -- particuarly how to take screenshots: this should be a tip-off to those of you working at Apple doing UX. ;)

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:AbjtmD0iL...

Some of the stuff you would guess was becoming less or more popular but there is other stuff which is less obvious.

edit: This is super interesting: http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:SnghYCuBW...

Looks like Hacker News is gaining popularity exponentially, too. :)

thedaveoflife
Less popular as a Google search doesn't necessarily mean less popular, in some cases. For instance, I saw text messaging on your down trending list but that is obviously as popular as ever. People probably just don't feel the need to search it because it has become so ubiquitous.
lhnz
That is true: this only measures current interest levels. A decrease in the current interest level of text messaging only means that people are not trying to find out about it as much.

However, why did it only start trending downwards in 2008? Text messaging was ubiquitous way before 2008.

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id%3AdeVob01...

Could it be the iPhone? Could it be the iPhone facebook app? Could it be BBM? (Or maybe I'm just reading too much into this...)

jkeel
In regards to the mac screenshots, I found the key combination a little too much for something I tend to do a lot. On my Win7 laptop I have OneNote and the screen capture with <win>+S was great. Now that I have Skitch, I find it way better because of the key combo and annotation features.
bane
On Windows "Print Screen" and "Alt + Print Screen" also take screenshots of your entire screen, and of your currently focused app, then stick it in the clipboard for pasting elsewhere.
subbu
Its surprising there are so many tube's.
swah
I wish there was someone I could talk about this IRL.
reustle
So the "web" really is a fad...

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:ie4JCwnHd...

lachenmayer
Quite the opposite; the web is becoming so ubiquitous that no-one has to find out more about it anymore.
boredguy8
"Free Text Messaging" is an interesting 4 year period, though it looks like it's dead as a search term now. Is this because of Google Voice? Or did people give up on the idea?

http://www.google.com/trends/correlate/search?e=id:g2VSqRc0n...

T-hawk
Everybody has unlimited texting on their phones now so there's no need. There was a time when unlimited texting was rare and not all phones even had SMS, so it was popular to use various free web-to-SMS gateways if you were at a computer and your recipient may not be. I used AT&T's gateway in particular to message friends for a few years before I got an SMS phone. There were also shady ad-strewn "free texting" gateways, some acting as frontends to the official ones, some with a Turk behind the scenes, and even some that didn't work at all but just faked a texting interface to serve up ads.