Roger Harris of Saving Species, put up an interesting post that seems to provides support for the hypothesis that most people care more about the latest pop star, fashion, Hollywood marriage / divorce or some other trivial fact from pop culture than about conservation issues. He used a plot showing Google searches (as a proxy for “Interest”) for “biodiversity” versus various pop culture terms:”Justin Bieber”, “Lady Gaga”, “Britney Spears”. It was unsurprising that the pop culture terms were searched more often than “biodiversity”, but it was a bit surprising how much more. As he points out:
Relative to searches for Justin Bieber, et al., the number of searches for biodiversity is essentially zero. Even if we take Britney Spears, whose star is fading, searches for her name during 2011 outnumber those of biodiversity by about 23 to 1. That is, for every person who searches for biodiversity, 23 are looking for information about Britney Spears.
Pretty disheartening result, I must say, at least on the face of it. Roger is a bit concerned about the result as well.
But what does it mean? Do people care more about one rather mediocre pop singer than they do about the dwindling variety of life on the planet?
I think it’s a an interesting exercise, and the results fit what we might expect, but on thinking about it, I would not give the results much weight in answering any questions save “What term is searched more?”
I was a little concerned about the biodiversity search term as a representative of “conservation”, and the acceptance of this search as, shall we say, a positive interest equal across all possible search terms. How many people do we expect to search for “biodiversity” compared to searching for “Britney Spears” and how do people search for those two conceptually very different terms?
Since he started with the argument of people caring more about pop culture more than conservation issues, I would have liked to see a comparison using more than just the term “biodiversity”. Biodiversity may be the heart of conservation, but I think it may not be the first term to come to most peoples’ minds when thinking about conservation. It is a relatively recent term, and while widespread in science, conservation and management communities now, is it as widespread in the public? And perhaps more to the point, is it understood by the public that biodiversity is the core of conservation? Perhaps it would be more representative of the spirit of the comparison to use a series of conservation oriented terms such as “biodiversity”, “endangered species”, “wildlife conservation”, etc., instead of just the term “biodiversity”.
The graph above (and all to follow) begin at January 2010 and extend to March 2012. The results are normalized to the highest data point (which becomes 100). Pop culture again has far more searches than a collection of conservation related terms.
Maybe I am wrong, but I think the primary group of searchers for “biodiversity” are likely students. Someone looking for an answer for a homework question for 6th grade science class or studying for their finals in Bio101 in college. What would a student search for? To me the most logical searches would be “biodiversity definition”, “biodiversity examples”, “measuring biodiversity” and plain old “biodiversity”. Other people besides students would surely search for biodiversity, but I think that it’s a term that you really only search for once or twice. For most people it has an answer. “Biodiversity is …”, “Biodiversity is measured by ….”, etc. Sure, there are a small group of people, most likely people in ecology or conservation, that may search biodiversity heavily as a keyword for news items, etc., but I believe this would be a very small group.
Using Google Insights again, we can check the context of the searches for biodiversity:
What about pop culture references? Here I think there is far greater diversity of major searches. Of course, I am not well tuned to pop culture, so my thinking may be biased, but I see least three major, specialized search groups. First are the groupies searching for the latest information on their pop idols, just in case the sites they frequent aren’t up on the absolute latest gossip. This group is likely responsible for the greatest “per capita” search effort. I know 2 people who search for information on Lady Gaga two to three times daily. The second group of searchers I can see would be the “normal” fan base. They probably search a couple of times a month to perhaps daily. They are looking for latest concert announcements, lyrics to the new songs, and perhaps a bit of gossip. The third group would be folks, like me, who have (ok, had) no idea who some of these pop culture people are (yes, I admit, I had to Google both Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga), but are prompted to find out. I have no clue what a groupie might search for, but I can see the wider, normal, fan base searching for “lyrics”, “concert”, and similar terms. Those of us that are, shall we say pop-uncultured, the most normal search would be for the name only. For this last group there is interest in the search term, but often it is only to figure out of what it is that we are ignorant. I will readily admit, my interest in Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga, et al. was completely extinguished as soon as I saw the search results. Those first two groups, though, will search repeatedly on the same term.
Using Google Insights to check the context of the searches for (ulp!) Justin Bieber:
Google has equated a search as being equivalent to interest in the search term. I think it is logical to use interest defined this way to compare terms from similar categories. Comparing a pop star to a politician and a public scientist is a fair comparison. Comparing philosophies such as capitalism and socialism is a fair use of interest through Google searches. In the case of biodiversity, comparing a similar idea, such as ecosystem, would be a logical use. Just for fun I ran a few Google Insights comparisons keeping the search terms from similar categories:
Compare “Capitalism” and “Socialism”
How about comparing “biodiversity”, “ecosystem”, “genetic diversity”, “species diversity”
Notice the cycle for both “biodiversity” and “ecosystem”? I think this supports my hypothesis about the major search groups for biodiversity being students. There appears to be a strong periodicity that correlates to the school year. Low “interest” July and August, then sharply higher September through the end of November. December break? Sharp but short decline. January to April high again. May? Even higher (finals anyone?) then trailing off for June as the trimester and K-12 schools taper on out. Fits my hypothesis, but really need to look through a longer time series, and compare the pattern to other searches that should and should not be correlated with school activity. Is there a general decline in Google searches in the summer and Christmas holidays because of people spending more time away from the computer? Does that alone explain timing and magnitude of the pattern seen.
Finally comparing “Bieber” : “Obama” : “Santorum” : “Hawking” : “Darwin”
While I think comparing the number of searches for terms of similar category (e.g. concept, person, activity, place etc.) is a valid way to compare some level of interest, I think it’s getting on shaky ground to compare interest in an idea such as biodiversity, with a pop star, using the number of searches conducted on Google. It’s a situation of comparing apples and broccoli. It seems to me that the underlying assumption that the number of searches for a term is an equivalent measure of interest for any possible search term, allowing comparisons across broad categories is flawed. But then, that is often a tricky issue with proxies—understanding the assumptions and what they mean for where the proxies do and do not work.
Where I do think this is an interesting and potentially useful tool is sort of at the interface of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and outreach. For an outreach organization understanding how people search for the concepts you provide outreach for is important. Often the terminology used by people who are experts on a subject is very different from terminology used by those who are familiar with the subject, which is very different from the terminology used by those who are entirely unfamiliar with the subject. Understanding what terms are often used by the different groups and how they search for them allows an outreach group to craft their outreach so that it is more discoverable for their target audience and allows better communication (& hopefully positive impacts) with that group. This is the type of work we used to do with large focus groups and surveys when I worked in industry. While I think it’s still a good idea to use either a small focus group or survey to get seed data, with Google Insights online the same results could potentially be accomplished with carefully planned Google Insights mining alone.
