I love playing around with Google Trends. You can see when particular search terms:”recession”, say, or “bailout”, hit the headlines and world consciousness and how they have fared since then. Here’s a fascinating one, though. I typed “Irish” into Google Trends and I got this profile.

No huge surprise here. Each year, there is a big spike around March 17th for some reason. The bottom graph tells the story of the Irish financial meltdown from 2008 onwards. Curiously, the St. Patrick’s spikes seem to be declining in magnitude each year. Something to worry about, perhaps?

Then I typed in the keyword “Ireland“.

A similar pattern can be seen on the bottom graph, but what is happening in the top graph? St. Patrick’s Day is almost invisible amidst the noise and yet, each year around Christmas, the frequency of “Ireland” as a search term takes a precipitous dip.  I wonder what that is all about?

Incidentally, I can’t quite figure out what the spike in late 2007 was either. Both “Irish” and “Ireland” show a similar increase, and Google isn’t helping me to locate it.