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Judging from Google's data, some sports events stir interest almost 
everywhere: the Tour de France, Wimbledon, the Melbourne Cup horse race 
and the World Series were among the top 10 sports-related searches last 
year. It also becomes obvious just how familiar American movies, music 
and celebrities are to searchers across the globe. Two years ago, a 
Google engineer named Lucas Pereira noticed that searches for Britney 
Spears had declined, indicating what he thought must be a decline in her 
popularity. From that observation grew Google Zeitgeist, a listing of 
the top gaining and declining queries of each week and month.

Glancing over Google Zeitgeist is like taking a trivia test in cultural 
literacy: Ulrika Jonsson, the Swedish-born British television host and 
girlfriend of England football coach Sven Goran Eriksson, made the list 
recently. So did Irish Travellers (a nomadic ethnic group, one of whose 
members was videotaped beating her young daughter in Indiana) and 
fentanyl (the narcotic gas used in the Moscow raid to rescue hostages 
taken by Chechen rebels in late October).

The long-lasting volume of searches involving her name has made Britney 
Spears something of a benchmark for the logs team. It has helped them 
understand how news can cause spikes in searches, as it did when she 
broke up with Justin Timberlake.

Google can feel the reverberations of such events, and others of a more 
serious nature, immediately.

On Feb 28, 2001, for example, an earthquake began near Seattle at 10:54 
am local time. Within two minutes, earthquake-related searches jumped to 
250 a minute from almost none, with a concentration in the US Pacific 
Northwest. On Sept 11, searches for the World Trade Center, Pentagon and 
CNN shot up immediately after the attacks. Over the next few days, 
Nostradamus became the top search query, fuelled by a rumour that 
Nostradamus had predicted the trade center's destruction.

But the most trivial events may also register on Google's sensitive 
cultural seismic meter.

The logs team came to work one morning to find that ``carol brady maiden 
name'' had surged to the top of the charts.

Curious, they mapped the searches by time of day and found that they 
were neatly grouped in five spikes, each one starting at 48 minutes 
after the hour.

As the logs were passed through the office, employees were perplexed. 
Why would there be a surge in interest in a character from the 1970s 
sitcom The Brady Bunch? But the data could only reflect patterns, not 
explain them.

That is a paradox of a Google log: it does not capture social phenomena 
per se, but merely the shadows they cast across the Internet.

``The most interesting part is why,'' said Amit Patel, who has been a 
member of the logs team. ``You can't interpret it unless you know what 
else is going on in the world.''

So what had gone on on April 22, 2001?

That night the million-dollar question on the game show Who Wants to Be 
a Millionaire? had been, ``What was Carol Brady's maiden name?'' Seconds 
after the show's host posed the question, thousands flocked to Google to 
search for the answer (Tyler), producing four spikes as the show was 
broadcast successively in each US time zone.

The precision of the Carol Brady data was eye-opening for some.

``It was like trying an electron microscope for the first time,'' said 
Sergey Brin, who as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford 
helped found Google in 1998 and is now its president for technology. 
``It was like a moment-by-moment barometer.''

Predictably, Google's query data respond to television, movies and 
radio. But the mass media also feed off the demands of their audiences. 
One of Google's strengths is its predictive power, flagging trends 
before they hit the radar of other media.

As such it could be of tremendous value to entertainment companies or 
retailers. Google is quiet about what if any plans it has for 
commercialising its vast store of query information. ``There is 
tremendous opportunity with this data,'' Mr Silverstein said. ``The 
challenge is defining what we want to do.''

Google currently does not allow outsiders to gain access to raw data 
because of privacy concerns. Searches are logged by time of day, 
originating IP address (information that can be used to link searches to 
a specific computer), and the sites on which the user clicked. People 
tell things to search engines that they would never talk about publicly 
_ Viagra, pregnancy scares, fraud, facelifts. What is interesting in the 
aggregate can be seem an invasion of privacy if narrowed to an individual.

In aggregate form, Google's data can make a stunning presentation. Next 
to Mr Rae's cubicle is the GeoDisplay, a 40-inch screen that gives a 
three-dimensional geographical representation of where Google is being 
used around the globe. The searches are represented by coloured dots 
shooting into the atmosphere. The colours _ red, yellow, orange _ convey 
the impression of a globe whose major cities are on fire. The tallest 
flames are in New York, Tokyo and the San Francisco Bay area.

Each country has a distinctive usage pattern. Spain, France and Italy 
have a midday lull in Google searches, presumably reflecting leisurely 
lunches and relaxation. In Japan, the peak usage is after midnight, when 
phone rates for dial-up modems drop.

Google's worldwide scope means that the company can track ideas and 
phenomena as they hop from country to country.

Take Las Ketchup, a trio of singing sisters who became a sensation in 
Spain last spring with a gibberish song and accompanying knee-knocking 
dance similar to the Macarena.

Like a series of waves, Google searches for Las Ketchup undulated 
through Europe over the summer and fall.

The Ketchup Song (Hey Hah) has already topped the charts in 18 
countries. In late summer, Google's logs show, Las Ketchup searches 
began a strong upward climb in the United States, Britain and the 
Netherlands.

Haven't heard of Las Ketchup?

If you haven't, Google predicts you soon will.