» Join Speeple | People | Groups | Blogs | News
Published: Mon, 28 July 2008, 15:04, also tagged: technology, news, development, search, statistics, graphs, speeple, speeple news, historical data
A graph is now displayed for certain searches which are grouped by day or month. The graphs display the activity over a time period of 100 days or 100 months.
The Speeple News graphs help outline when keywords were popular in the index, normally by showing a spike. This is most visible during sporting and seasonal events along with major world issues.
Published: Mon, 14 July 2008, 07:16, also tagged: technology, search, google, search engines, statistics, google trends, swastika, 卐, ǝlƃooƃ, ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ
Manipulation of the Google Trends query rankings seems easy as pie. On the 13th of July Google Trends top ten search terms included “ǝlƃooƃ noʎ ʞɔnɟ”. This is shortly after the swastika making an appearance.

Google states that a single post on a large forum community (4Chan) was the cause of the “卐” appearance:
Published: Thu, 10 July 2008, 14:37, also tagged: search, google, statistics, hindu, nazi germany, google trends, swastika, 卐
Many blogs and news sources are reporting the swastika symbol was a top search term on Google Trends for a brief period. Google seem to have rectified the issue with the swastika no longer in the top searches list.
The swastika 卐 has innocent meanings as a Hindu symbol and negative connotations via the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and the adoption of the symbol to represent Nazism.
The appearance of the swastika in the top searches list in my opinion appears to be spam via some kind of sophisticated manipulation. I’m not sure Google will issue information regarding its appearance, but nevertheless it’s very strange. The fact that a search for “卐” now produces:
Published: Tue, 8 July 2008, 17:01, also tagged: games, technology, google, social networking, messaging, virtual worlds, second life, instant messaging, social software, avatars, google talk, gtalk, lively, google lively
Google today has launched a new service named Lively. Google Lively provides users interactive avatars on top of the Google Talk (GTalk) instant messaging platform.
Lively works through a browser plug-in that is currently only available for Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox on Microsoft Windows. The Lively browser plug-in allows the service to be embedded directly into web pages.
Second Life and other such competing services might be in for a tough time – although in its current form Google Lively doesn’t consist of a single world, each room is individually created by a user, so for now virtual worlds with a central world aren’t direct competition. It does seem very feasible that future iterations of Google Lively will have a central world where users can interact.
Published: Tue, 1 July 2008, 16:43, also tagged: technology, rss, news, development, programming, statistics, syndication, speeple, speeple news
I’ve put together a source for Speeple News Statistics. The page provides overall statistics of the Speeple News service, including health statistics such as crawl rate and top sources grouped by domain and individual feeds.
The stats cover news item totals, feed count, feed types and type version and content languages. The page is updated every 30 minutes.