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Search and News Trends for Sustainability and Sustainable Business

I love Google Lab's new search Trends feature. I used it recently to look up several sustainability related trends.

Here's the trend for sustainability:

You can see that over the past two years, the search volume for the trend has remained relatively level, while the news reference volume has been gradually increasing.

The same search also shows the top ten cities, ranked by normalized search (i.e. searches on sustainability as a percentage of all searches for the given city). I was surprised to see that the top five positions were held by Australian cities, and glad to see the sustainability mecca of the U.S. (Portland, Oregon) on the list.

Read on for my discoveries about sustainable business search trends...

Here's the trend for sustainable business:

It's hard to know how to interpret the spikiness of the early part of the search volume. But we can see that the news reference volume hasn't increased in the same way as sustainability has. There does seem to be increased news volume clustered in the early part of 2006, but otherwise it is relatively constant.

The top ten cities for sustainable business searches are surprisingly different than those for sustainability. The Australian cities have moved way down, New Zealand leads the list, and Portland has moved up to the #3 spot.

A comparison of sustainability to sustainable business shows the disparity more clearly:
From this perspective, we can see that sustainable business (blue line) is only a tiny fraction of the mindshare around sustainability (red line), and the difference in growth of news reference volume for sustainability versus sustainable business is very clear.
Although I'm probably reading too much into the data, it seems as though:
  • general interest in sustainability is about level (evidenced by no growth in sustainability search term)
  • but news coverage of sustainability is growing (evidenced by news reference growth)
  • sustainable business doesn't have nearly the mindshare of sustainability (evidenced by small fraction of searches and news references), and is showing only a small increase in news references in 2006.

The relationship between sustainability and sustainable business, while not surprising, seems indicative of a general unawareness of the causality: unsustainable business is the primary driver of unsustainability.

Posted by will hertling on July 11, 2006 6:09 AM |


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