American Idol Season 7

I have a weird relationship with American Idol. For some reason, I seem to fall in love with the show every few seasons and cease to care at all in the off-years. Anyhow, this has turned into one of the years where I can't help but follow the show week to week...and I've even started voting. Contrary to popular belief, votes are accepted from people other than 12 year old girls...

I've been wondering for awhile how the week to week voting impacts decisions made on the show, such as who is called out on stage in which order, who gets the most screen time, sits in the front/back row, singing order, etc. At the very least, it'd be neat to see how different the show would be if the viewers saw the votes each week. Would it cause people to vote more? Reinforce crowd favorites?

In my own attempt to find some predictive power beyond DialIdol, I decided to review the trends of Google searches on some of my favorite contestants. What I found was pretty interesting.

For the past few weeks, I've felt myself getting bored of David Archuleta- apparently I'm not the only one. Each week his peaks and troughs seem to be getting lower and lower. Conversely, David Cook went from one of my least favorite contestants to possibly my favorite after a number of strong weeks. How about the rest of the country? Well, it seems they've really caught the fever. Check out the query volume explosion for him this week! Now let's see if he can follow-up next week and keep the momentum...