Yes, also echoing my earlier posts, I agree. In that they’ve chosen to include a miserably stingy number of graphs they could have been more even handed in their selection.

I really like BJones’s suggestion that such graphs should be generated universally on demand. Hey, how about such a “search and graph Zeitgeist” beta? Now there’s a feature I’d like to see.

Most newscasts I’ve ever seen go like this:

“this person got shot, this person got sentenced to 25 years, this scam is going around, look out for this disease, new trial starts tomorrow, roberry here,terrorism OMG, sex offenders OMG save us, house fire here, car crash here, famous person died, and oh yeah have your pets spayed or neutered”

It’s all negative. It’s all people nowadays seem to care about.

But it can’t all be negative. I cited the Air France search idea. I’m sure there had to be a huge percentage spike when the crash occurred.

What about the Super Bowl? (Or even Terrell Owens, since there are occasional positive stories out there for him.)

Hell, why not the word “Jagger”?

I’m not a left-wing thinker either. I’m actually one of the more conservative thinkers out there.

But there’s an underlying theme here that bothers me: “We’re Google, and we’ll provide the results you want for the news you want, from the death of Rosa Parks and full coverage of her funeral to pictures of Katrina to dead bodies lying in a London street from a terrorist attack.”

In other words, the behaviour itself may be normal. I have no reason to doubt as such. But of the millions of stories out there and the spikes created by each, there could have been a better selection process, that’s all. This was an error in judgement, and there have been examples cited of things that could have been used as search terms that could just as easily have created dramatic spikes.

It appears to me that these examples were chosen by the Zeitgeist Team because they showed the most dramatic or revealing spikes/patterns. If the searching public has bad taste (I don’t necessarily think so) that would be an important example in this series.

Perhaps your own image in a mirror upsets you too.

Why is that poor taste? ZeitGeist shows that a famous and respected person in history is of the interest of many people with peaks when things happen that reach the news. Seems prety normal to me.

Using it as an example should not be considered bad taste.

Submitted it a long long time ago, nothing done. If i can remember the URL of where to submit it, I’ll try it again.

Been seeing alot of these lately, it’s looking like that with each update google makes, more and more black hat techniques start working and popping up.