Microsoft uses Bing data to see which city wakes up the earliest

Microsoft has been talking a lot lately about how it plans to offer more products that handle "big data". Today, the Bing search team offered up an example of that kind of effort, but in a fun way, by using data from its search site to determine when people in 25 major U.S. cities get up in the morning.

The Bing blog states how the information was calculated. It says:

We calculated the time at which we receive 50% of daily peak traffic from each metro area in their local time zones. The 25 cities follow the same general curve across all seven days of the week. While the patterns are the same, we did see a 43 minute shift between the earliest risers and the late risers.

After examining the data, Microsoft says that traffic from the New York City area reached 50 percent of its peak at 7:23 am local time. However, the folks in San Francisco hit that same mark at 6:43 am, again in its time zone.

So the question is why do people in NYC seem to start their day much later than folks in San Francisco. The blog doesn't try to speculate but we would guess that folks in the Big Apple may live much closer to their workplace than people in San Francisco, who might take more time to commute to their job. Therefore, they might need to wake up earlier.

Microsoft also showed that, according to their Bing traffic data, people tend to get started on Monday later (7:10 am on average) in the US than they do for any other day in the work week. The times get earlier as the week goes on until we reach Friday, where the average start time is 6:48 am.

Source: Microsoft | Image via Microsoft