{"id":947,"date":"2008-01-21T10:28:22","date_gmt":"2008-01-21T02:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/?p=947"},"modified":"2019-12-13T20:08:22","modified_gmt":"2019-12-13T12:08:22","slug":"yahoos-recession-buzz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/computers\/yahoos-recession-buzz-947","title":{"rendered":"Yahoo’s recession buzz"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yahoo's Molly McCall runs Buzz Log (now defunct), which gives a summary of what's hot in Web searches.<\/p>\n

Why do search trends matter? Because they give an insight into what people are interested in - or worried about.<\/p>\n

Last week's Recession Fever: Catch It! indicated a spike in searches for the dreaded \"r\" word - recession. As Molly reported:<\/p>\n

\n

Demand for \"definition of a recession economy\" surged nearly 500%. Questions asking \"what is a recession\" picked up 260%, while \"what is a recession economy\" and \"are we in a recession\" nearly vaulted off the list.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Using search data to determine public interest in a topic may be more useful than opinion polls, since we can infer a lot from more what people do<\/i> rather than what they say<\/i> they are interested in.<\/p>\n

For some (pretty vague) insights into Yahoo's methodology, under the heading what's the buzz?<\/i>, we read:<\/p>\n

\n

A subject's buzz score is the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject on a given day, multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read. Weekly leaders are the subjects with the greatest average buzz score for a given week.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Meanwhile, Google Trends indicates graphically<\/a> the large spike in searches for \"recession\":<\/p>\n

recession - Google Trends<\/p>\n

Web data is an interesting and important field. How many statistics courses include a subject on Web metrics?<\/p>\n

Be the first to comment<\/a> below.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yahoo's Buzz Log indicates a lot of people are worried about a US recession.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[131],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12345,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/947\/revisions\/12345"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.intmath.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}