Just playing around with Google Trends as a tool for tracking memes.
Some patterns are completely predictable. For example, "christmas":
The lower graph shows increasing news volume at Christmastide ever since Pres. Obama was elected, owing perhaps to Bill O'Reilly's War on War on Christmas.
Even so, heathens are still in the game as even Mithras gets a nod, more or less, at year-end:
iPods are evidently hot gifts in the holiday season:
Besides the sharp peak at year end, there's also a mini-boom in iPod interest at the beginning of the school year.
In more political matters, the term "inequality" has a curiously periodic chart:
Turns out this is correlated with the school year, with search activity falling dramatically around this time of year and during the summer. This is the pattern with many terms that might tend toward academic or scientific interest, as opposed to, say, "kardashian". Still, there is definitely a bump up recently in interest in inequality, particularly in news stories.
More charts after the jump...
The collapse of the housing bubble brought the "short sale" meme into prominence:
Likewise for food stamps:
Dailykos was a hotter search term under a Republican Adminsitration:
Of course, "occupy" is a more recent phenomenon:
Here's the detail on "occupy" for the last 12 months:
Sarah Palin is down:
But Tony Bennett is up:
As are exoplanets: