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The Google Trends Spike Before the D.C. Shooting Raises New Questions

29 points| kldavis4 | 3 months ago |allenanalysis.com

15 comments

order

epistasis|3 months ago

I wish this had a bit more technical information, because I don't think I learned much here other than some people are looking into it, and apparently shouldn't subpoena IPs or anything.

Is there a time zone misalignment, perhaps? If it's one or two searches, could it be the shooter searching their own name? Unless there's a clear technical reason showing these to be artifactual, why is a subpoena premature?

stOneskull|3 months ago

> could it be the shooter searching their own name?

makes sense. like, wanting to see what will show up when others eventually search him.

londons_explore|3 months ago

I'm gonna guess some timezone related bug in googles data source - especially when the client timezone and country specific Google site might be set wrong but incorrectly trusted for this data source.

gmuslera|3 months ago

May not be related with this in particular, but how many names that are not tied to any shooting or whatever appear in low activity google trends? It could happen with most names around the region where you live, i.e. related with spam campaigns, AI searches, people curious about people in their neighbourhood or whatever that covers most of the people? If it is something common giving a reasonable time frame before a given moment, it could be a coincidence that may not be so rare. Checking only backwards for a particular event and not doing the check forward to see if that is unusual is a missing link there.

qwertox|3 months ago

Does this mean that going from 1 query to 3 is a 200% increase, hence 20 pixels high, which is the same as going from 1000 queries to 3000 queries in that same timeslot? Same height? Could be noise then, if 3 people searched for the name. Or maybe they were chatting with him and the told them his name and that he's about to do something harmful. But noise is different, those are not neglectable peaks.

juancn|3 months ago

Also, bugs in time handling of buckets should also be considered (or rendering).

At Google's scale, trend analysis is anything but easy.

delichon|3 months ago

> less work means less worth

s/worth/meaning

downrightmike|3 months ago

I'd bet $100 that all the shootings are just admin attempts to incite justifications for admin actions.

seizethecheese|3 months ago

Even if plausible for one case “all the shootings” is ludicrous, of course.

arccy|3 months ago

too many words with no conclusion at all