This is cool:
At Yahoo! Research, JASMINE NOVAK has been running data analysis to identify when a search term becomes very popular, or “bursts.” Sharing this data with us, we did reverse IP lookup on the addresses in the data and plotted the patterns of activities as a particle system. Here, in a time-lapse animation, particles show queries from each location worldwide. Visualized are searches for “miss teen usa” (related to this video), “cricket” (world playoffs) “mattel” (recalls of toys with lead paint), and a close up on the Gulf of Mexico for “hurricane felix”.
This is a nice example of a clean, informative data visualization. The obvious next step is making it interactive… pair this up with Google Earth (Yahoo! may not be too interested in that, but you get my drift) and let the user spin the globe around and try out their own search terms, and suddenly you have an interesting and potentially useful cultural tool for studying patterns in viral marketing, politics, any meme at all. Presumably there is a fully interactive version hiding deep within the labs, so let us at it!
Have a look at their other projects – there’s some very interesting stuff trumping FlickrVision, SigAlert (which particularly looks like something right out of 24), and more. It’s clear they have some good designers on this team.
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One Response:
January 7th, 2008 at 6:03 pm
I couldn’t understand some parts of this article Query Bursts, but I guess I just need to check some more resources regarding this, because it sounds interesting.