Trends: Michael Harlan, Unlabelled Spikes
What This Image Shows
A Google Trends capture. Search term Michael Harlan, region Washington DC (Hagerstown), window Past 12 months. The line sits flat at zero for almost the whole period, punctuated by two narrow spikes reaching an index of 100, with no tooltip label showing.
The shape itself is the thing to understand. A flat line at zero broken by two isolated bars is what Google Trends produces when a term has very low absolute search volume -- the index is relative, so the busiest single week becomes 100 no matter how few searches that represents. A term nobody searches will still show a spike on the day two people do.
That is why this whole set of charts cannot carry the weight placed on it. Without absolute volumes, which Trends does not publish, a spike is uninterpretable. It is not evidence that anybody in any particular place looked up anybody in particular.
The name comes from an unverified crew list for N1098L, and nothing here connects any person to that aircraft. See the cluster overview.
Related Areas
- Cluster: N1098L NCSS CIA
- All photo evidence: Photos
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