Funny

In Sweden we always hear that Americans (and others) have problems to differentiate between Sweden and Switzerland.

However, I didn't really realize to which degree this is true until I tested Googles new tool, Google correlate.

Very interesting investigation tool which help you to find the most correlated searches to a given input.

For instance, if you search for the flu you will see a timeline of how the search for that word is distributed over time, and some other search words with similar time distribution will appear.
In the case of "flu", the search for "flu signs" has an almost identical distribution of time. I.e, there is a very good correlation between these searches. It is easy to understand this correlation, the persons that do the search actually is searching for almost the same thing, and the peaks come in "flu times".

If you search for Sweden, you will see that the best matching search word actually is "Switzerland" (and vice versa, almost).

This correlation is easy to explain by the fact that people in US (the tool only uses data from US searches at this moment) actually has very little knowledge of the difference between the two countries.

How to explain the correlation between "breast augmentation" and "buy homes" is still in the air :-).