That Danny!

Google Flu trends tracker - the new service launched by Google.org holds both an amazing promise and a somewhat disconcerting threat.
The flu tracker was created by Google.org, the philanthropic arm of Google, and it uses aggregated search information to estimate flu activity in the US, or as Google.org itself explains: “We’ve discovered that there is [...]

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Nikki Catsouras and her tragic death in her father’s Porsche have shown us a more sinister side to the web. Although news organisations have generally been sensitive and offered limited coverage of this story (a search on Google news for “Nikki Catsouras” at the time of writing brings up very few results), the web was [...]

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USB Missile Launcher - the new sudden fashion in the US.

Everyone is searching for USB Missile launchers. Like the Gulf war never happened… Well, here they are: USB Missile Launchers, as revealed in secret Pentagon documents.

In case you’re wondering how this came to be discussed on my blog - there is actually a (semi) serious [...]

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Suriphobe - someone suffering from Suriphobia.
Suriphobia - Fear of mice and rats is one of the most common specific phobias. It is sometimes referred to as musophobia (from Latin mus for “mouse”) or murophobia (a coinage from the taxonomic adjective “murine” for the Muridae family that encompasses mice and rats). Suriphobia, from the French [...]

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Apologies in advance for this post. It is presented here for scientific reasons only…
And I kid you not. Here is the screenshot:

There seem to have been some problems with Google Trends over the last 24 hours with the content not updating for a while, and then this one rose to the top, circumventing any sanitation [...]

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If you got here through a search engine in the past few hours, you are very likely to have typed “Realty Check: Who sparked Countrywide CEO Mozilla’s “disgusting” e-mail reply?”
Yep, this is one of those geeky entries, but it does suggest that search is a great reflection of social trends. Here’s how:
When The Financial Chairman [...]

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