I’ve been playing with Google Insights more and I’ve run into unexpected behavior. I’m not sure if it is because there is a bug, or because it doesn’t work like I think it should.

If I look at searches for “Picnik” for the last 30 days, I see an interesting distribution across several states. If I do the same search for July, I see a similar pattern.

If I instead do a search for multiple date ranges (Jan, April, Jun, July) I get a map (and a table) that shows all the search volume as coming from California. If I use the pulldown they provide to change the time period mapped, the distribution remains the same. Even July shows that all the search volume for “picnik” comes from California.

I tried changing the span of the first time period. It looks like there is a bug, it only displays the results for the first time period, even as you try and switch to new time periods. It’s confusing, because it changes the color coding.

I’m seeing this with the latest version of Firefox 3 on a Mac.