by Hassan Nicholas
The What:
As I was taking a break from Excel madness I perused through Google and stumbled upon this nifty tool. The Google Trends application allows you to enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched in Google over time. It breaks the results down by country, region and city automatically. You can even generate the chart to capture certain periods of time.
Below you'll find one that I generated. It takes a look at how popular "money management", "FICO score", "credit card debt", "budgeting" and actor/comedian "Bog Saget" fared against each other in Google searches over the past twelve months. Why Bog Saget? I'm sure there's a punchline in here somewhere, but I'll let you come up with that.
The Results:
Overall our friend Bob Saget did not stand up too well when it came to topics in personal finance. He flat lined through the end of October to January of this year, had a nice spike that plateaued from April through June and fell back down again. Though, the rise in August looks promising, looking at the trend we could expect another nose dive shortly after wards.
To be fair, Bob Saget generally has nothing to do with money management. A better comparison would probably have him up against Dane Cook, Jerry Seinfeld, Jamie Kennedy, and Chris Rock. But, this was all done in fun so enjoy it for what it's worth.
As we look at the financial topics we can see that not too many people are Googling "money management" and "budgeting" (are we really surprised?). And "FICO score" and "credit card debt" seem to follow similar patterns (again, are we really surprised?). I expected to see a sharper increase in credit related topics in July and August- especially off the heels of the new credit card legislation. Well, Google Trends is not perfect but I hope they continue to develop it further. It's a great tool, fun, and easy to use.
I mean, hey, at least it got you thinking of Bob Saget again...
Oh, and just for kicks I did "Love and Money"
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