St. Louis Google Trends

Back in May, Google launched its new Google Trends feature. It’s a tool that lets you see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine. You can enter and compare up to five items, separated by commas. You can also sort the results by city, geographic area, and language. It features a graph that shows you the number of times the topic appeared in Google News, but doesn’t include blogs. There is a way to see the impact of the bloggers though. You can compare the number of searches for the blogger with the number of searches for the subject of the blog and see how close they graph together. Google is still working on building its database, so some lesser known searches will not turn up any results. One thing that I found a little unusual was that if you enter Google Trends into Google Trends, you would get the list of cities, but no other data. It just says that the data is not available.

You can use Google Trends to see what your own city is up to search-wise. Some of the ones where St. Louis comes in first aren’t surprising such as: Arch, baseball, Chuck Berry, Cardinals, and the Rams. We ranked number one in Sammy Hagar searches. This is not really all that surprising since he has always been popular here and usually sells out all of his shows. Some are a little more surprising: We ranked #2 in searches for country music right behind Nashville, and I thought that St. Louis was more of a rock and roll kind of town. Searches for Johnny Cash were right up there at #3 behind Dublin, Ireland and Oslo, Norway?? We were #1 in searches for beer, Budweiser and White Castle hamburgers. Anyone who has been to the home of the Murder Burger in south St. Louis County real late on a Saturday night knows the reasoning behind that one. Chicago beat us out in searches for “Cubs suck.” Hmmm. Maybe it’s because they think that they really do suck, or maybe they just want to find out what we are saying about them. Another unusual one is that we placed #2 in searches for steroids right behind Chennai, India. We placed high on the term “scalping” also. I wasn’t aware that steroids and scalping was of much interest to St. Louis, but maybe all that testosterone helps grow back the hair. We were #1 in searching for information on the Three Stooges, long hair, pee pants, and poop. I think I know why these are so popular in St. Louis, but I prefer not to go into it at this time.

Some search items that didn’t turn up any information, but should have, would include baseball caps, Provel cheese, Ted Drewes Ice Cream, and ” where did you go to high school?” That one might be under the sub heading of ClassMates.com.

When you look up which cities did the most searches for St. Louis, Maryland Heights comes up first. Could it be that this city, which is in north St. Louis County, doesn’t know where St. Louis is? Most of the other cities that did a lot of searches for St. Louis were in out state Missouri and Illinois, with the exception of Minneapolis and Kansas City, Kansas. Maybe people in other states already know everything there is to know about us here in St. Louis and we need to educate the people in our own state. But then sometimes, out state Missouri seems like another country anyway.