It’s transfer season which means loads of rumors flying around the press and loads of bored fans searching the internet for info on their club’s possible new signings.  Since Google Labs recently released Google Correlate, I figured now was a good time to see if any insights could be gained using it to investigate transfer rumors.  If you’re not familiar with Google Correlate, it finds things that are related based on how much people are searching for those phrases (query volume).  Alexis Sanchez is a favorite player of mine (I was living in Chile when he burst onto the scene with Cobreloa) and I’m interested to see where he ends up this summer, so I decided to see what Google Correlate says about him.

What phrase’s search popularity is most correlated with “alexis sanchez”? Ruffle tankini! A simple explanation is that every summer Alexis’s future is up for discussion and summertime is also when people are looking for swimwear, hence the correlation.  It’s a nice little reminder that strange things can be correlated and you need to be careful with the conclusions you take away from it.