So perhaps you’ve seen the latest bell (or whistle) to come out of Google HQ. It’s called Google Trends and it lets you look at the search volume over time for different keywords. It also shows you which regions search for a particular term the most. Initially, I was most interested in that geographic data. I figured perhaps this could settle that tiresome debate about which city is “most literary.” Here are the results
- Delhi, India
- Chennai, India
- Austin
- Portland (Oregon, I’m assuming)
- Chicago
- Seattle
- New York
- Denver
- Minneapolis
- Philadelphia
I was, and still am, a curious about the two Indian cities at the top of the list, but I did recently write a post about the MV Doulos (Ship of Books) being docked in Chennai. But, anyway, to get to the more serious issue, by this metric our most literary city is Austin, and New York (pretender to the crown) comes in at number five, while our venerable Californian cities don’t even make the list. Before we get too riled lets remember that these cities are just guesses. From the FAQ: “Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated.”
Regardless of Google’s guestimates, I was curious about some other bookish searches. “Harry Potter” shows a preponderance of international searches, and the series’ impressive ability to stay in the news. Or you can see how the young wizard compares to pretender to the throne, “The Da Vinci Code.” If you ever doubted how popular Harry Potter is, that graph should convince you. Getting back to Da Vinci Code, though, to those of you who have grown weary of hearing about Dan Brown’s book, would it surprise you to find out that, according to Google, the book is more popular than ever?
Moving on to scandals, it turns out an Oprah tie in can help you in that department, too. Observe James Frey’s drubbing of JT Leroy. Kaavya Viswanathan, meanwhile, hasn’t generated enough of a scandal to register.
Turning to awards, remember when the National Book Award generated a stir in 2004 by nominating five women from New York as finalists, looks like it paid off (in search traffic anyway). And here’s all the prizes I could think of going head to head (I’ll call the Booker the winner, since the Pulitzer includes all those journalists).
