Week 5 of CeDO 540

This week we took a look at Google Trends.  I found this to be really interesting.  I really liked how easy this site makes it for a person to look at the popularity of two or more subjects based on the searches for the certain topic.  As a group, were were too look into this site and research a topic.  We decided to look into popularity of professional sports.  It was really neat to see the big difference in popularity between NHL and NFL here in America.  Football is a lot more popular!  However, you are also able to look at popularity in different areas of the world.  To no surprise, Canada's love for the NHL for surpasses that of its love for the NFL.   We also compared the NFL to the NBA and they actually were quite similar, but some cities had higher interest for NBA or NFL than others did.   After looking into our group assignment, I wanted to play around with Google Trends a bit on my own.  I took different U.S. cities and matched them up to on another.  New York had the most hits, followed by Chicago.  I was a bit surprised, because I thought 2nd place would be Los Angeles since it is the second largest city in the country, but Chicago had quite more hits than LA.   One thing I found very interesting was when I put Minneapolis in Google Trends.  Overall, there isn't much activity for searches on Minneapolis, but there was a large spike around August 2007....or when the I-35 bridge collapsed.  That event cause many, many people to look up Minneapolis.   Anyway, I am happy that I learned this new tool and I hope I will be able to use it for something practical in my personal or professional life in the future.