Comparing Real Interest and Media Interest
The most interesting thing to me about this Inside Facebook story on Facebook surpassing Myspace in US Google searches was the accompanying graph. While it’s big news in an of itself, a closer look at the search versus news coverage tells an interesting story. Starting in the middle of 2007 Facebook began to overtake Myspace in media mentions. At the same time Myspace was roughly four times more popular as a US search term. While that gap slowly closed over the last two years, the media coverage for Facebook was consistently at or above Myspace.
Now I mention this because if you were to follow just media mentions (which many do), you would be falsely led to believe that Facebook was far more popular than Myspace. This isn’t a particularly revolutionary idea, but comparing searches (intentions) versus news mentions on Google trends gives a nice way to compare these things in a simple way.
Got any more of these trends that show the media over-representing? (For the record, I’m not sure the media is doing anything wrong here. Facebook was the property who’s interest was growing. With that said, it’s impossible to say what that growth would have looked like without the aggressive coverage.)
Hi, I'm 
I read this and forgot about it at first, until I asked myself, ‘who’s googling facebook or myspace?’ This seems like one of those user behaviors that should have died off by now.
Though I’m not sure if it accounts for searches like “facebook news” or facebook + search term.
You could test the hypothesis that the search behavior exists more in the late adopters of tech, and this graph demonstrates their gradual attention.
My guess is that this is either happening or soon will happen with twitter as well. Twitter really isn’t a very large site (about 5m uniques according to compete/quantcast) in comparison to FB and MySpace. However, I hear its name dropped in many media outlets almost arbitrarily.
In fact CNN has incorporated twitter so much into its programming that I almost wonder if its emphasis is warranted at all. I also read a Wired article that quoted a random Twitter user’s thoughts on some topic or another. I really don’t care what @numbnuts has to say about anything to be honest.
Time will tell… good topic
Hey Noah – as someone in PR I notice this stuff for just about everything (it’s my job to stay on top of media trends). The media all swoon over something and it starts a repetitious cycle.