NSF vs. NEA vs. USAID vs. NEH vs. IMLS

I faced off five grant-making US government agencies: the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).



The NSF was clearly in the lead, followed by the NEA and USAID. IMLS was at the bottom of Google-popularity. However, which one was decreasing or increasing its search volume? That was hard to see. I downloaded the data and plugged them into MS Excel. I made a graph of the cumulative weekly Google searches:



The lines were pretty smooth, in other words, none of the agencies saw extreme differences in search volume from one week to another. How about a graph showing the trend lines of the change percentage of the data of weekly Google searches?



Now I was getting somewhere: obviously, the IMLS experienced the highest increase on average, then the NSF and USAID. The other two showed a decline on average, with a small decline for the NEH and a larger one for the NEA. Getting back to Google Insights for Search, I had a look at how the searches were spread geographically. First, the NSF:



The top 3 states were New Mexico, District of Columbia and Maryland. Nevadans stood out for searching for the NSF the least. Next, the NEA:



The leader was here Arkansas! Not the state I would have most linked with the arts if you'd asked me. There must be an explanation for this: any suggestions? No. 2 was Alaska—also unexpected—followed by Vermont. Let's move on to USAID.



DC led big time as was expected, followed by Maryland and Virginia which also have a high concentration of federal government people concerned with international issues. North and South Dakota, Wyoming and West Virginia had no searches for USAID at all. How did the NEH fare?



DC, Rhode Island and Massachusetts were the most interested. The "zero-searchers" of USAID were joined by Nevada, Idaho and Montana. Finally, how did the distribution pattern of the IMLS look?



Strangely enough, Idaho was the clear leader! It was followed at some distance by DC and Maryland.

Democratic Party vs. Republican Party vs. Green Party vs. Libertarian Party vs. Constitution Party (Part 2)

We explained the method used for this experiment, i.e., analyzing "toss-up" states in the US presidential election by comparing Google Insights for Search and Pollster.com graphs, in Part 1. So let's get started right away with Minnesota:





We again obtained contrasting graphs. The Republican Party (RP) was overall more Google-popular than the Democratic Party (DP). In the Pollster.com graph, however, Obama was ahead the whole time. Also, McCain's trend line followed a similar path as the RP's line while the Obama trend line was almost an inversion of the DP line. Hmm... Next is North Carolina:





This was the first state we encountered that had an actual trend line for a third-party candidate, i.e., Barr, because there were enough opinion polls that included him so as to still show up in Pollster.com's high-sensitivity graph. It is often said that he might take votes away from McCain. True, McCain lost his lead at the end of September but Barr's low trend line, if anything, was diminishing somewhat through time. In this state too we found a contrast between the parties' graph and the candidates' graph: The DP was ahead but was bypassed by the RP at the end of August. Let's look at New Hampshire:





The Google-popularity graph suffered from the lack of enough data: did New Hampshirites not surf the web as much as the inhabitants of other states? Maybe they were "politicked out" after their prominent role during the primaries? For what it's worth, the DP was the leader till mid-September when the RP passed them by. The candidates' trend line graph did confirm the overall picture with McCain temporarily overtaking Obama in mid-September. Remember that the Pollster.com graphs give a continuous trend line while the Google Insights graphs show basically monthly averages connected by a line. This explained in a way Obama having already taken back the lead in the end while the RP was still ahead. I give you one more toss-up state today: Nevada.





In this state also the general picture was the same in both graphs. The DP/Obama was ahead for most of the year but by September the RP/McCain was trumping them narrowly. I will post the last part tomorrow.