My friend Rob Hatton pointed me to Google Correlate, a new service that lets you explore data trends in a few different ways. The theory is that the history of searches should expose both some interesting trends and correlations, often faster than than the way ‘official’ approaches work.
On a lark I typed in SQLSaturday. It found no matches but recommended SQL Saturday, so I tried that, and got the chart below. I’ll have to admit that I didn’t expect a correlation to Dave’s Killer Bread! I’ve amused myself trying to guess reasons:
- We have a speaker who loves DKB and is evangelizing (though I had not heard about it until now)
- Spouses are waiting for the weekend of SQLSaturday to buy the DKB so they can have it all to themselves
- Dave is a SQL guy
- Dave is an incredibly savvy marketer that sees the grass roots success of SQLSaturday and has found a way to associate his brand with SQLSat (and now I’m helping!)
Beyond my mild amusement it’s something I wish I had more time to spend working on. They have a really nice data set and are giving us some tools to work with it without working about technical trivia. It may not answer every question, but even if it helps someone discover the correlation and then apply more sophisticated tools it’s a win. It will be interesting to see.
