Ever wondered what people are searching for on Google? Well, the search engine giant has a nice little tool where you can analyze traffic and see how curious the world is about…well, whatever you want. Google Trends allows you to pick up to five different search topics and see how often they’ve been searched over time.

Just a few days ago, Google launched a new gadget where you can embed a simple Google Trends graph into a webpage.

I figured I’d do some basic searches and have a little fun with it.

Good vs Evil

It’s nice to see that Good continues to dominate and is in fact expanding its lead. Although, I do find it interesting that Evil saw a spike in the month of March around my birthday. Coincidence? I guess it was Friday the 13th…

Black vs White

As expected, these are pretty even. The only thing that is odd is that black always sees a spike in November that appears to be getting larger every year.

North vs South vs East vs West

East, what the heck? Why are you slacking off so much?

Tarheel vs Blue Devil

Enough said…

Yesterday I went down to Charlotte for the final round of the Wachovia…Wells Fargo…Quail Hollow Championship. It was sunny and warm, most of the top golfers were playing and the tournament was a close contest. It was a good time. Here are a few observations from my trip:

Phones/Cameras

We weren’t allowed to bring phones or cameras to the course. OK, I understand that they don’t want anyone’s phone ringing or camera shutters clicking during Tiger’s backswing (he gets furious), but thousands of people manage to take phones on airplanes every single day and not use them. It’s 2009. They need to embrace technology, not ban it. It would have been so nice to be able to check the current leaderboard from my iPhone when I was a half mile away from the nearest video screen. Or be able to check what hole Phil Mickelson was on, so I could avoid the herd (or is it pride?) of Yankee cougars who follow him. I say allow phones, but just require silenced ringers and make designated phone areas. If you’re caught using your phone outside of that area, you’re kicked out and your grounds pass is revoked. Seems simple enough to me.

Kasey Kahne threw a temper tantrum until they allowed him to take his toy guns with him to Victory Lane

Kasey Kahne

I saw NASCAR driver Kasey Kahne out on the course. That guy is tiny. Actually, tiny is an understatement. I think Gary Coleman might be taller. It really makes Archibald Hutchinson’s claims of getting shoved to the ground by Kahne look ridiculous. Furthermore, I think it’s really irresponsible for Budweiser to have a 12 year old be the face of their NASCAR representation. This makes those Allstate commercials with the older women swooning over him look even more disturbing.

Tiger Woods

I got to see Tiger Woods up close on Sunday and I will admit, it’s really amazing to see him in person. He’s the best golfer playing right now and it’s pretty cool to stand 10 feet away from him while he takes a tee shot. That said, I’m never doing it again.

He was in the 2nd to last pairing on Sunday and I knew there would be a crowd with him. I wanted to be sure that I could see him up close, so I posted up at the rope beside the 3rd tee box and watched the four or five pairings ahead of him come through.  As soon as he had made his putt on the 2nd hole, the crowds came like a herd of buffalo. You could hear the rumbling of hooves as they stampeded to the 3rd hole tee box in an attempt to catch a glimpse of Tiger. People crowded closer and closer, eventually beginning to push and nudge to try and get in front. It was miserable. I felt like I was in the middle of thousands of starving refugees clamoring to get to a bread truck. He walked up to the tee box, gobbled down some trail mix, grabbed his 3 wood, crushed a tee shot and just like that he was gone. Well, so was the crowd. Suddenly I could breath again, so I stuck around and comfortably watched as the actual tournament leaders came through and teed off on the same hole. I could have done jumping jacks there was so much room. The exact same thing happened when I posted up at the 15th hole in the afternoon.

I understand that he’s the biggest name in golf and the best player in the world, but seeing him in person is much more trouble that it’s worth. I’ll still pull for him to win tournaments, but from now on, I’m only watching Tiger on TV.

Boo Weekley

Boo Weekley is my favorite golfer. I love lists, so I’m going to make a short one of reasons why I like Boo:

• He’s sponsored by Bass Pro Shops.
• He lives in a trailer.
• On Sunday he was wearing a camo hat and a shirt with camo on it.
• He dips tobacco while he plays. (Personally I think dipping is nasty, but it’s funny that he does it while playing in PGA tournaments)
• At the 2008 Ryder cup he did the Happy Gilmore “ride the bull” dance after a good tee shot.
• He’s constantly jarring on the course and talking loud enough for everyone to hear. For instance, at the Wachovia Championship last year he told Brandt Snedeker to stop raking out the bunker because, “Man, they’ve got people to do that for you. You just need to do what you do best, stand there and look pretty”.

Just check out both of these videos and you’ll understand how entertaining this guy is.

I’m a huge fan of Google Reader. I use it daily and have about 30-35 RSS feeds pouring into it at any one time ranging from the general Foxnews feed to the tech blog Engadget to Ohio State basketball bench warmer, Mark Titus’ Club Trillion blog. It’s a really great way to quickly check for updates on sites you’re interested in. I specifically use Google’s because it’s web based, so I can access it from any computer and even my iPhone.

One potentially great feature of Google Reader is Trends. It is essentially a stat tracker for your RSS feeds. It keeps track of how many items you read, numbers read each day, time of day, etc. The time of day features is specifically interesting to me because I can tell when during the day I’m actually wasting the most time by reading news instead of doing work.

The other thing it tracks is the specific number if items read per feed. It compares that to the number of items posted to that feed to give you a percentage of each feed that you have read. This seems like it would be a great tool for helping to weed out what you don’t actually look at and what you’re reading the most of. But that’s where the problem comes in.

I move through large amounts of content in Google Reader by scanning the title of the article. If it looks interesting, I’ll click on it and continue reading. If not, I’ll just pass over it and when I get to the end of the list, I’ll click “mark as read” so that the unread count goes away. According to all the documents I have read, clicking “mark as read” isn’t supposed to count toward your read total (since you didn’t actually read, it just marked it that way). But while looking at my reading trends, I’ve noticed that it doesn’t seem to be accurately counting my items read. The image below shows the stats from my top-10 feeds. I can honestly say there is no way that I have read 720 different Engadget articles over the last 30 days. I scan through the vast majority of my feeds and don’t actually click on them to read them. According to this chart, I read at last 60% of most of my feeds. That is simply inaccurate.

For comparison, here is the same list, but with the “Read on mobile” tab selected. These are the stats for Google Reader from my iPhone. They seem to be MUCH closer to the truth.

So what is the problem? It seems to be only that the web based reader isn’t keeping proper stats. I’ve tried to do research on the subject and the general consensus around the web seems to be that this can be fixed by unchecking “In expanded view, mark items as read when you scroll past them” under the Google Reader settings. Well, I’ve had that unchecked for over 30 days now and the numbers have not gone down.

This is not a major concern. I’m certainly not using these stats for anything important, but it has been an enigma to me for a few months now and I’d just like to figure it out. It’s very frustrating to not be able to find an answer for something that seems fairly obvious. I can’t be the only one that is seeing this “trend”.

I’d love some advice here, Google. I’m not counting near the number of items read that you are…

Shooter McGavin: Oh, you can count. Good for you.
Mr. Larson: And *you* can count, on *me*, waiting for *you* in the parking lot.

UPDATE (5/1/09): It appears this has been resolved, as I’m now seeing accurate read counts for all feeds. I guess bitching about it fixed it…who knows.

A few thoughts have been driving me nuts about college hoops lately.

ACC vs Big East

I don’t want to hear anyone else going on and on about how the Big East is far and away the best conference. I’m looking at you Dick Vitale and ESPN. Let’s look at the facts. The ACC is 10-6 against the Big East this year, 40-33 against the Big East over the last five years, and 84-60 against the Big East over the last ten years.

Even if you don’t want to compare head to head, let’s check the current RPI standings to continue a purely statistical analysis. The ACC has 5 teams in the top 20 and 11/12 teams in the top 100. The Big East has 5 teams in the top 20 and 11/16 teams in the top 100. Looks pretty even to me…except for the fact that the Big East has 16 teams.

I think the two are comparable in strength, but when considering the fact that the Big East is 25% larger, I have to give a slight edge to the ACC. Heck, even Joe Lunardi is picking the ACC to get 8 NCAA tournament bids versus only 7 for the Big East.

ESPN + dook = bff 4eva

Yes, it's photoshopped. Don't sue me.

I know UNC is always a media darling, but at least we’re backing it up with talent this year. Dook on the other hand is underwhelming to the point where those geniuses in the media are grasping desperately for something good to write about.

At the beginning of the season, it was Andy Katz claiming that Brian Zoubek is “now a serviceable big man” despite the fact that he fouled out of their first game in 7 minutes and couldn’t even pull down more than 1 rebound in 3 of the first 5 games. Now you have Bobby Night and Mark Schlabach carrying on and on that moving Elliot Williams into the starting lineup has revitalized the team and they are now a final four and national championship contender.

• Nevermind that rumors were abound that he was threatening to transfer because he hadn’t played a single minute in the past two games (both losses).
• Nevermind that with this new lineup they struggled to beat a bad (13-15) St. John’s team.
• Nevermind that it took Gerald Henderson (35pts) and Jon Scheyer (30 pts, 5/10 3pt) having career nights in order to beat a sliding Wake Forest (4-4 over their last 8 games) on what is supposedly the toughest home court in America.

Now I’m happy for Elliot Williams. I really am. I know it must be frustrating to think maybe you’re college selection might have ruined your career like any number of other recent highly touted dook recruits. But to instantly claim after watching the last two games that putting him the starting lineup (something which I think should have been done long ago anyway) has somehow changed this team into a championship contender really is a stretch.

This isn’t Nam, there are rules

The excessive physical play has got to stop. That’s at least 3 concussions in 3 weeks. (Tyler Hansbrough, Blake Griffin and Nolan Smith) Hansbrough and Griffin get absolutely brutalized in the post game in, game out and the calls seem to be disappearing faster than Greg Paulus’ minutes. At the same time they’re calling more non-existent touch fouls on the perimeter. What worries me is that it is going to take a horrific, career-ending injury to a star player before something is done.

Figures that as soon as I make fun of Michael Waltrip and the Aaron’s Dream Machine, it’s involved in a crash. Check out this video of Michael McDonald wrecking the Dream Machine on Friday in qualifying at Texas. He walks away fine. This is either good proof that the safer barrier and the Car of Tomorrow really work or else he’s taken on some of Michael Waltrip’s superhuman abilities.

Michael Waltrip is unbelievable. He won 2 Daytona 500s, so he lures us into thinking he was once a good driver. It makes me want to start him in my fantasy NASCAR league this week, but then I look at his career and he’s only won 4 total races in almost 700 starts. That’s mediocre at best.

What’s really remarkable is how many times he can completely demolish a car and still walk away fine. Check out the videos after the break.

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