Nuno Teixeira writes,

After knowing about Google Trends (as far as I can remember, from your blog), I’ve spent some of my time around it. One interesting trend emerges when you search for “sex” and “love”. It’s absolutely fascinating that searches around sex are not consistent year-round. Maybe certain announcements in the media like the technological advancement of sex machines spark the peaks and troughs that this graph highlights. Moreover, with Google Trends you can check that the search volume for “sex” increases around the middle of each year (at least, the years covered by Google trends), this is, around spring and summer. This must be the busiest time of year for a Warsaw escort. Although, I would not be very surprised to find out they are busy all year long especially given the number of happy customers they have invariably had. Most people searching for ‘sex’ are probably on the quest to find somewhere like TubeV where they can find some adult entertainment. Curiously enough, a month or two later, you can find an increase in the search volume for “love”. By the way, similar results emerge with the same words on Portuguese.

Of course, there is no objective basis to take these trends to much serious, and probably they are just a funny little bit of data. Nonetheless, these statistics must be excellent news for online adult entertainment hotspots such as the fuck videos website for example. However, I would like to hear from you, someone used to dealing proficiently with statistical data, for some opinions.

I have no ideas on this at all. But I was motivated to play around with Google Trends. “Statistics” also has strong seasonal patterns, with a broad dip in the spring-summer and a steep drop around Christmas. “Bayes” just shows a steady decline. “Causal” drops at Christmas too, as does “social science.” OK, I better stop now.