Sunday, July 30, 2006

Birdingest U.S. Cities

There is now an annual competition for America's Birdiest City based on the number of species recorded during a 72-hour period in April or May. But in what cities is interest in the general subject of birding the greatest? Now, thanks to Google Trends, we have one way of quantifying that interest.

One of the features of Google Trends is that it graphs the cities from which the highest number of Google searches have been made (relative to all other searches from that same city) for any given search word or phrase. I here look at the top-10 U.S. cities in which searches on the keyword birding are most frequent. Using the All Regions (i.e., worldwide) and All Years search features, the top 10 cities are (in decreasing order):
Denver, CO
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
Portland, OR
Houston, TX
San Francisco, CA
Washington, DC
Minneapolis, MN
Boston, MA
Phoenix, AZ
For reasons that I don’t understand, you get a slightly different list of top-10 cities if you confine the search region to the United States:
Tucson, AZ
Denver, CO
Madison, WI
Seattle, WA
Austin, TX
Reston, VA
Portland, OR
Rochester, NY
Sacramento, CA
Houston, TX

2 Comments:

Blogger Bill Pulliam said...

Perhaps the search for just the US uses a larger number of cities and/or finer subdivision of major metro areas? For instance, Washingon DC versus Reston VA.

July 31, 2006 2:05 PM  
Blogger John L. Trapp said...

Good thought, Bill. Yes, I think the U.S.-restricted search probably includes smaller metropolitan areas such as Reston, VA.

July 31, 2006 2:29 PM  

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