I couldn't help but notice that traffic to this blog has increased about 5-fold since I began posting about Adi Da's death. Perhaps I should take my cue from the producers of "Deal or No Deal" and continue to beat this horse as long as it brings in high ratings. To research, I went to Google Trends to see if the number of people interested in Da has spiked.Da's popularity, as measured by the number of Google searches for "Adi Da," has skyrocketed since his death. Volume has more than doubled in recent days. The magnitude of the upswing, leaving competitor gurus in the dust, is illustrated by the line graph below, found at:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=adi+da%2Cramana+maharishi&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0
Da's post-mortem performance is particularly impressive, since the count includes searches for just one of his many names. To be fair, though, we must consider the possibility that numbers for "Adi Da" are inflated by people who really wanted information about the "Adidas" sneaker company.The #1 city for "Adi Da" googling, by a huge margin, is Clearlake Oaks, CA, USA. I believe this is the location of Da's "Mountain of Attention" sanctuary. The #1 country is Turkey, and #1 language is Turkish. Turkey is followed by Slovenia, Brazil, and Romania, with USA coming in a disappointing 9th.
I can't say for sure what the deal is with Turkey. If in fact there's been recent news regarding the manufacture of Adidas sneakers in Istanbul, that'd explain a few things.
9 comments:
Stuart,
I made a reply over at Lightmind to this same post, but I urge you to conduct the following experiment:
1) Go to Google Advanced Search
2) On the "this exact wording and phrase" line, type: adi da
3) On the language line, choose Turkish
4) Click the Advanced Search button
You will find it returns about 791,000 hits exclusively in Turkish, as "adi" and "da" are actually common words in the Turkish language. I don't know what they mean. I'm beginning to think they are prepositions.
Upon further investigation...I located a Turkish to English translation tool through Google and found that the phrase "adi da" in Turkish directly translates into English as "the name of", "adi" meaning "the name" and "da" (yes, a preposition) meaning "of".
Thanks again, \m, for getting to the bottom of the Turkey mystery. I'd half-heartedly tried to find the translation myself, my knowledge of advanced Googling and translating wasn't good enough to find the answer.
Speaking of Adidas, one of the funnier images that came up in my google image search for "Adi Da" was this one. =D From the caption of "ball marker," I'm assuming it's used for golf.
Hi Stuart ...
I have been out of touch as you know, immersed in the Obama movement. But coming back makes me realized I have missed this spot as it slows me some and makes me think and reflect.
Also I have pretty much resettled my blog in a new location where I can build at a relaxed pace the sort of thing I really want -- a more integral blog in which politics, music, theology and pattern language are as interwoven in text as they are within me.
I did not know of Da's death. But I did read your response and can remember my brief but quite deep encounter with his thinking in the latter part of the 80s. The part I took from it comes up now for me in the phrase practiced transcendence. I was able on the basis of my encounter with his thinking to literally operate quite mindlessly, even while driving, if that makes any sense.
I pulled back when I investigated further. My own work on Jonestown and some warnings I picked up from folk in the Bay Area became a red flag. And I deposited the good and moved on.
That he had the degree of influence he had testifies to whatever your interpretation might be, from thirst to an unhealthy vulnerability. Wherever he is, I assume and hope he is able to laugh.
I've linked you up on my blog so I can visit regularly.
Stephen wrote...
I deposited the good and moved on.
Thanks, Stephen. We can learn from all teachers, including the rivers, trees, grass, etc. And we can do so without following any teacher.
I've updated the link list (on the right of this blog) to point to your new wordpress blog.
\m said...
"adi" and "da" are actually common words in the Turkish language.
As a test, I compared the Google searches for Adi Da with those for Franklin Jones (see this link). Trends for the 2 names have closely tracked each other for over 2 years... though post-mortem, it's only "Adi Da" that spiked.
This suggests that the results (e.g., "Adi Da" googles vs those for "Ramana Maharishi") aren't skewed by searches by Turks and sneaker-philes. But the mysteries of Google Trends remain beyond my comprehension... for some reason, though the Turkish googles appear not to affect the count, Turkish is still listed as the primary language for "Adi Da" googles.
I would interpret the chart differently. The Turkish and other foreign nation searches have probably grossly inflated the numbers, meaning that baseline interest in our "Adi Da" is much lower than the graph would indicate.
However, the spike of traffic following Adi Da's death should be entirely attributed to this event, which would mean that it represents a truly huge increase in internet searches that are actually aiming at information about our "Adi Da" rather than incidental foreign language searches.
Whereas, searches for "Ramana Maharshi" seem consistent and not likely to reflect incidental traffic. The pre-death baseline for "Ramana Maharshi" is therefore probably greater than for "Adi Da", but the post-mortem spike is much higher.
Dear Author stuart-randomthoughts.blogspot.com !
What necessary words... super, an excellent phrase
Post a Comment