Web Search Patterns and Jewish History
What can Google Trends teach us about perspective?
We're a messy species, we human beings. We're always doing stuff and leaving behind long, dirty trails of evidence of the stuff we've done. The scrap metal left in some Bronze Age family's backyard is today an archaeologist's PhD thesis.
And, more than you might imagine, it's still happening. Take the Google Trends service, which generates lots of lovely data representing the rising and falling popularity of particular search engine phrases. Is there, for instance, a coherent pattern to the timing of internet searches for the words daf yomi?
You bet there is. And wouldn't you know it? Those three very obvious spikes in interest just happen to correspond to the last three Daf Yomi siyums in March 2005, August 2012, and January 2020. No mysteries here. Although it does serve to validate the assumption that we can correlate search data with real-world events.
Google breaks down their data by country. As you can imagine, web searchers in Israel were the most likely to look for daf yomi, earning a score of "100" - meaning that theirs was the region where there was the greatest interest. The US scored 11 and Canada and South Africa both logged in at 5. But would you have guessed that searches by daf-yomi-curious folks in "Palestine" generated a whopping 66? Who knew?
But let’s focus on a different search history that, on the surface at least, feels a lot less happy. Are there any visible patterns to the way people have searched for the phrase “chillul hashem”? This chart built from Google data suggests that there are:
Although they can be hard to make out from that chart, there were around nine significant spikes over the past eighteen years.
Now what would inspire someone to search for such a phrase? For my part, I certainly don’t immediately respond to news about a Jew misbehaving by searching Google for the words “chillul hashem”. And I doubt you do either. Perhaps these are the searches of non-Jews or non-frum Jews seeing the phrase used in Jewish media and wondering what it means.
But the big question is whether the spikes actually represent reactions to historical events or are simply random. Using archives from a number of Jewish blogs to refresh my memory I think I can connect eight or so of those nine events to clear historical “inspirations.” Here they are:
March 2005: The Slifkin ban.
January 2006: Either the Yudi Kolko abuse scandal, riots in Ramat Beit Shemesh or, perhaps, metzitza b’peh infections in New York.
May 2007: A prominent article about the Agriprocessors’ scandal published in the New York Times.
December 2011: Charedim spitting on school girls in Beit Shemesh.
March 2020: Israeli elections (?)
May 2021: Lag B’omer tragedy at Meron.
August 2021: Covid vaccine controversies (?)
October/November 2021: The Chaim Walder scandal
February 2022: ?
Many of those events left us deeply disturbed and shaken. In fact, there were times when many of us wondered whether Orthodoxy could survive in its current form. For various reasons, those were very difficult times.
But seeing them all together in a single list could have a bright side. Through those tumultuous two decades there were, after all, only nine such events - just one every two years. And, when everything’s said and done, we are still here - perhaps made stronger for the lessons I hope we’ve learned. When you consider the kinds of social and economic pressures we’ve experienced and how large and fractious a people we are, that might not actually be such a bad record.
Is there, in general terms, a precedent for this kind of reaction? Sure there is. See the first Rashi to פרשת מסעי.
Now let’s see if we can’t find more insights into our society using tools like Google Trends and the Google Books Ngram Viewer. I know I’ll be looking.