I discovered an interesting pattern while playing around with Google Trends: if you compare ‘Yale University’ and ‘Harvard University’ with the tool, there is an eerie similarity in their trend lines. Even minor up and down ticks are mirrored across search terms. See for yourself: trends chart below, Harvard in red, Yale in blue.

The trend is clearer for Google search data, but there are still some pretty strange similarities for the news references (below the main chart). I understand that every time one school does something, the other feels compelled to respond, but the fact that these trends link together so closely is very interesting. My first question was whether much of this might just be seasonal–fluctuations in the course of the admissions cycle. To test this, I compared Yale with a few other schools, trying to eliminate large sports schools as a factor. Georgetown vs. Yale produced fairly similar results to Yale v. Harvard, but not with the same level of overlap.

Years ago I did this same comparison with Phillips Exeter Academy vs. Philips Andover Academy (interestingly, historically they were once prominent feeder schools for Harvard and Yale, respectively) but the results there were not numerous enough to show any significant overlap; the numbers there were probably inflated by vanity searches from the students at either school.

Other interesting trends to take from this data: search volume for both of these terms has declined continually over the years, relatively speaking. Why is this? Is it because people are better able to use the school sites and don’t do as much searching, or is it because of a methodological feature whereby their search volume stays stable but relative to other terms decreases? It’s not clear, but it’s an interesting trend all the same.

International attention is something else to compare. If all the queries came from Australian applicants, hypothetically, that would shift things in the calendar because of their different school cycles. But more realistically, it’s just an interesting reflection of foreign interest. Harvard predictably comes out ahead, but check out these countries which are ranked by how much people are searching for Yale (Harvard comparison):

Google lets us get even more precise, though: down to city level. This is really interesting because we see the rate at which Yale students search for themselves compared to how much Harvard students search for things about Yale. If we then compare this to another chart, showing how often Harvard searches for Harvard, we see that Yale–via New Haven–doesn’t even make the top ten. In other words, Harvard is by some measures more interested in Yale than Yale is in Harvard. Inferiority complex much? : ) (Yes, I realize this is methodologically flawed… just joking).

Finally, we can compare the international chart with a language chart. English is first, then Chinese, then, surprisingly enough, Italian.

Very interesting for a few minutes googling! I highly recommend playing around with google trends and exploring interesting things about your own favorite words, or trends, or schools. Dogs and Puppies beat Cats and Kittens, etc. Have fun, and don’t draw too many sweeping statistical conclusions : )