Geographic information is an important factor in social media analysis. In this post I used Google's super cool new service Google Insights to identify in which state a company is located. It indeed matches quite well with either where the company is headquartered or where it has its production facilities.
Let us look at the search popularity for a few companies:
General Motors
Intel
Dell
Home Depot
Berkshire Hathway
Moreover, this also applies pretty well to other named entities:
Joe Biden, Senator Delaware
Bill Richardson, Senator New Mexico
I hadn't expected that for company names this would work so well. I was thinking that most of the search volume for corporations would be biased towards NY due to the stock markets.
This is pretty awesome and I hope that there is a Google Insights API to be released soon. :-)
That's interesting and striking. I just tired experimenting with some US Universities and was surprised to see that in every case, Google's top ranked state was the one where the university was located. This was so even for schools that are generally thought of as having a very national, if not international, profile -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford. It's also true for schools that are in the national news because of their athletic programs.
Posted by: Tim Finin | August 22, 2008 at 05:14 PM
On a related note, of the questions I had about Google Insights is how does it deal with population diversity and variations in the distribution of queries. One very interesting paper on this topic is
L. Backstrom, J. Kleinberg, R. Kumar, J. Novak. Spatial Variation in Search Engine Queries. Proc. 17th International World Wide Web Conference, 2008.
http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/www08-spatial.pdf
Posted by: Akshay Java | August 22, 2008 at 05:21 PM