Google just released an interesting new feature yesterday: Google Trends. One of the interesting features of Google Trends is that it gives you a list of the top ten cities that have searched the most for whatever terms you put in. Obviously, I decided to try it out with the search term "housing bubble." Here is the resulting graph:
Not surprisingly, interest in a housing bubble seems to have peaked late summer of last year, around the same time that the housing bubble was getting the most news coverage. Also not surprisingly, Seattle doesn’t appear in the top ten list of cities searching for "housing bubble" online. Here’s the top ten list, as of today:
- Santa Clara, CA
- Pleasanton, CA
- San Jose, CA
- Rancho Santa Margarita, CA
- San Diego, CA
- San Francisco, CA
- Irvine, CA
- Reston, VA
- Washington, DC
- Sacramento, CA
Actually that’s more like a top five list. San Francisco (1, 2, 3, 6), Los Angeles (4, 7), San Diego (5), Washington, DC (8, 9), and Sacramento (10). Apparently people in the greater San Francisco area are more worried about a housing bubble than anyone else in the country—by a pretty wide margin—and Californians in general are the by far the most worried about their precious bubble being burst.
Unfortunately Google Trends only provides the top 10 so we don’t have any way of knowing how far down the list Seattle would have come in. I suspect it would have been pretty low. I get the general impression that the thought of a housing bubble hasn’t even crossed the minds of most people in our area.
In other Google-related news, does anyone else find it strange that this blog comes in as the #1 result for the search "Seattle bubble" on MSN Search and Yahoo Search, but isn’t even in the top 100 on Google? What’s with that? I don’t know how much good it will do, but Google does provide a quality feedback form that you can complain on if like me, you think that’s somewhat bogus.
(Google, 05.10.2006)