Somebody 'splain this to me, please...

[Wayne Harrison]

So Google has this thing called "Google Trends" and it tracks the instance of words put into its search engine and where most of the search requests come from...

So naturally, I put in "caving" and got this:

http://tinyurl.com/oa9no

Denver seems to be the city that has searched caving more than any other in the United States. And what was the spike in "news volume" of caving stories in the spring of 2004 (March)?

If you search "caves" then it changes and Austin is the city that searched the most for "caves" (Denver drops to #10). Also the news spike is in April of 2004 when this story came out:

3 Teens Die Exploring Minn. Caves
Wilkes Barre Times-Leader - Apr 28 2004

http://tinyurl.com/mm7x7

[hewhocaves]

the denver thing should be easy. there was the south park episode a few weeks ago with 'cave of the winds' in it. (you should know that - you got the avatar :) )

i can't explain the other ones offhand. wait a sec...

in march 2004, there was a big story about some cavers from the UK getting their visas revoked in Mexico. that made pretty big headlines (i think there was a rescue involeve in there as well).

i can't explain the austin thing. but the minnesota thing is temporally congruent with the march 2004 timeframe as well. could be some crossrefrencing there as well.

i know there was a king of the hill which had a cave, the start of the xfiles movie had a cave in texas (i think). there could be some other things that acount for it as well.

all in all, an interesting bit of data mining, wayne

john

ps: 'caves' could also refer to 'caving in' which is commly referred to in political life. thus you may be getting a lot of false positives there.

[hewhocaves]

aditionals:

http://www.google.com/trends?q=cave+&ct ... all&geo=US

note the correlation in news for 'cave' with march and the cave rescue in mexico. Of course I can't explain 'roanoke' at all in this context.

google can, though. type in 'roanoke' and 'cave'. you'll find the town of 'cave spring' outside of roanoke, va. the same occurs with 'chandler' and cave. (chandler is a suburb of phoenix with a 'cave creek').

spelunking is intersting if limited in information
http://www.google.com/trends?q=spelunking&ctab=0

now 'caver' is really interesting.
http://www.google.com/trends?q=caver&ctab=0

most of the answers here are german cities.

ok.. that's enough. i'll let someone else dig up the rest.

john

[Squirrel Girl]

in march 2004, there was a big story about some cavers from the UK getting their visas revoked in Mexico. that made pretty big headlines (i think there was a rescue involeve in there as well).

Yeah, and some yeah hoo wrote an article for the NSS News on it.

[mitsuko]

I think that MN one that they are talking about was a bunch of teens that went in a cave in St Paul to party.
Some of them ended up by dying.

That was 2003-2004ish.