'People lie, internet stats tell the truth'

Tancer spends much of his day seeking patterns in a sample of 25 million taken worldwide by HitWise through ISPs, although he hastily points out that the data is anonymised and collated. Hitwise simply doesn't have any interest in tracking individuals.

TechRadar asks if it's sometimes easy to start seeing patterns where there are none, or add two and two together and make five.

"One thing I've written about since finishing the book is what I call narrative fallacy – so when you have a massive dataset you might fall in love with your hypothesis and really look at the data that supports it.

"So there is a little bit of intellectual honesty needed, and you have to be pretty diligent.

Lipstick on a pitbull

"I was writing a piece for Time and there's a theory in the states which as been propagated by the Chairman of Estee Lauder that in tough economic times sales of lipstick goes up.

"The theory is that lipstick is an affordable luxury – when times are tough it doesn't cost much to buy lipstick.

"So I charted the search term lipstick over a three year period to see if I could find a correlation and get this flat line up until September 2008 and then a massive increase in the searches on lipstick.

"I then superimposed the Dow Jones Index over the top and got that perfect negative correlation. I'm so excited; I write my column and I'm about to submit and then I decided to take a step back and looked a little deeper.

"One thing I can do with our data is to look at all the search terms that contain the work lipstick and when I did that the entire column was shot because the number one search term was 'lipstick on a pitbull'.

"The whole discussion between Sarah Palin and Barack Obama and that one phase had been a huge topic of conversation; people were looking for videos or articles. It just happened to coincide perfectly with a drop in the Dow."

Patrick Goss

Patrick Goss is the ex-Editor in Chief of TechRadar. Patrick was a passionate and experienced journalist, and he has been lucky enough to work on some of the finest online properties on the planet, building audiences everywhere and establishing himself at the forefront of digital content.  After a long stint as the boss at TechRadar, Patrick has now moved on to a role with Apple, where he is the Managing Editor for the App Store in the UK.

Latest in Internet
Google Maps on a phone being held in someone's hand
Google Maps is getting two key upgrades, for easier route planning and quicker access to Gemini AI
Quordle on a smartphone held in a hand
Quordle hints and answers for Thursday, March 27 (game #1158)
NYT Strands homescreen on a mobile phone screen, on a light blue background
NYT Strands hints and answers for Thursday, March 27 (game #389)
Pinterest
How to post on Pinterest
Quordle on a smartphone held in a hand
Quordle hints and answers for Wednesday, March 26 (game #1157)
NYT Strands homescreen on a mobile phone screen, on a light blue background
NYT Strands hints and answers for Wednesday, March 26 (game #388)
Latest in News
Nintendo Music teaser art
Nintendo Music expands its library with songs from Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Tetris
An image of Pro-Ject's Flatten it closed and opened
Pro-Ject’s new vinyl flattener will fix any warped LPs you inadvertently buy on Record Store Day
The iPhone 16 Pro on a grey background
iPhone 17 Pro tipped to get 8K video recording – but I want these 3 video features instead
EA Sports F1 25 promotional image featuring drivers Oscar Piastri, Carlos Sainz and Oliver Bearman.
F1 25 has been officially announced, with this year's entry marking a return for Braking Point and a 'significant overhaul' for My Team mode
Garmin clippd integration
Garmin's golf watches just got a big software integration upgrade to help you improve your game
Robert Downey Jr reveals himself as Doctor Doom to a delighted crowd at San Diego Comic-Con 2024
Marvel is currently revealing the full cast for Avengers: Doomsday, and I think it's going to be a long-winded announcement