The Google Trends Spike Before the D.C. Shooting Raises New Questions
allenanalysis.comI 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?
> could it be the shooter searching their own name?
makes sense. like, wanting to see what will show up when others eventually search him.
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.
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.
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.
Also, bugs in time handling of buckets should also be considered (or rendering).
At Google's scale, trend analysis is anything but easy.
> less work means less worth
s/worth/meaning
I'd bet $100 that all the shootings are just admin attempts to incite justifications for admin actions.
Even if plausible for one case “all the shootings” is ludicrous, of course.
I was tempted to put "right on right" shootings, but the "all" should be sufficient.
too many words with no conclusion at all
This does not currently show up on Google Trends, so unless you're trying to go full conspiracy mode here I don't see why we should trust this random screenshot to be accurate: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...
If you change the region, it does show up.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...
Are you in a different timezone?
I an in EST and do not see any traffic before 7pm Nov 26 EST.
I can confirm I am seeing data in EST time because the latest data available is from 20 mins ago in EST.
I think these graphs are just too unreliable. If I set it to Past 90 Days, there's a blip on Sept 6, 2025 with a value of 28. The next data point isn't until Nov 27, 2025 and it goes up to 100. If I then set it to Past 12 Months, the only data is in Nov and there is nothing for Sept. Then, even more interestingly, if I change it to "News Search" (instead of Web Search) and set it to Past 12 Months, the biggest spike is actually May 18-24, 2025 where the value is 100 and the Nov blip is only 9. https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=CA&gprop=news&q...
EDIT - that was set to Canada. If I set it to Worldwide the values change obviously.