Alternative energy has become a priority for many companies, especially oil and gas firms that seek to create a positive spin on widely viewed negative industry traits. Countries across the world have begun to implement various policies to increase forms of alternative energy and it appears as though South Africa leads the pack, at least with search engines like Google.
A study conducted by Google on web searches, dubbed Google Trends, show significant increases in alternative energy news stories with a peak in web searches beginning in 2006. When the website detects a spike in news stories via the internet search engine, a label is displayed with a headline of a story occurring during that time, Jennie Johnson, Google spokesperson, told Alternative Energy Africa.
A major surge has occurred this year in news stories relating to alternative energy. The interesting note is that South Africa leads the way in these searches, with the US and the Phillipines following respectively. To explain these calculations, Johnson said,
“All results from Google Trends are normalized, which means that we’ve divided the sets of data by a common variable to cancel out the variable’s effect on the data and allow the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. If we didn’t normalize the results, and instead displayed the absolute rankings of cities, they wouldn’t be all that interesting – a densely populated area like New York City would be the top city for many results simply because there are lots of searches from that area.”
While companies, countries, and news sources alike are increasing their notice on this sector, South Africa might just be the tipping point for other African nations to make the top ten Google list under the key words “alternative energy.” To see an illustration of this emerging trend, visit https://www.google.com/trends?q=alternative+energy.