The Google Trends Spike Before the D.c. Shooting Raises New Questions

I'd bet $100 that all the shootings are just admin attempts to incite justifications for admin actions.

I wish this had a bit more technical information, because I don't think I learned much here other than some people are looking into it, and apparently shouldn't subpoena IPs or anything.

Is there a time zone misalignment, perhaps? If it's one or two searches, could it be the shooter searching their own name? Unless there's a clear technical reason showing these to be artifactual, why is a subpoena premature?

This does not currently show up on Google Trends, so unless you're trying to go full conspiracy mode here I don't see why we should trust this random screenshot to be accurate: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=now%207-d&geo=...

Or Google Trends is sloppy with timestamps or time zones. In any case, I’m not too impressed with the analysis:

> ”The screenshots circulating show three distinct spikes […] for the [shooter’s] name […] at approximately 2:24 a.m., 3:28 a.m., and 8:00 a.m. on November 26. The shooting occurred at roughly 2:15 p.m. that afternoon.”

> “There are several plausible explanations. A social media post containing his name may have circulated before mainstream news outlets picked up the shooting. Early reporters or local community members may have speculated or shared details before verification, which then produced search traffic.”

…this does not seem like the kind of “plausible explanation” that presents a genuine alternative. Instead, it feels like a strawman, to inflame the conspiratorial interpretation by implication.

“We’re the reasonable ones, look at us carefully weigh the evidence and conclude that only the conspiracy could

possibly* remain!”

> less work means less worth

s/worth/meaning

May not be related with this in particular, but how many names that are not tied to any shooting or whatever appear in low activity google trends? It could happen with most names around the region where you live, i.e. related with spam campaigns, AI searches, people curious about people in their neighbourhood or whatever that covers most of the people? If it is something common giving a reasonable time frame before a given moment, it could be a coincidence that may not be so rare. Checking only backwards for a particular event and not doing the check forward to see if that is unusual is a missing link there.

too many words with no conclusion at all

[delayed]

Also, bugs in time handling of buckets should also be considered (or rendering).

At Google's scale, trend analysis is anything but easy.

Does this mean that going from 1 query to 3 is a 200% increase, hence 20 pixels high, which is the same as going from 1000 queries to 3000 queries in that same timeslot? Same height? Could be noise then, if 3 people searched for the name. Or maybe they were chatting with him and the told them his name and that he's about to do something harmful. But noise is different, those are not neglectable peaks.