eBuzz - Checking Google Out Under The Hood

Checking Google Out Under The Hood

Google Trends has been an interesting and vaguely useless component to the Google empire for nearly two years now. It allows user to enter a keyword and see a graph of how often that keyword has appeared as a search term on Google. Neat, except that there were no number attached — which is where the aforementioned "useless" assessment came in.

That all changed recently, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal:

First, the good news: Rather than simply eyeballing that graph and guessing at the numbers, users can download a spreadsheet. It shows, for example, that in mid-December "Ron Paul" searches world-wide outnumbered "Barack Obama" queries, six to one, but now Sen. Obama is outpacing the erstwhile Republican presidential candidate, eight to one. This should fuel more uses of the tool, which even without the numbers had been deployed to monitor the Democratic presidential primary, to locate the biggest markets for MySpace and to track the proliferation of bedbugs, or at least newspaper stories about them.

The usual caveats apply, including that not all searches are conducted in Google, that Web users sometimes navigate without searching and that some terms have double meanings (which is why "Orange" is such a popular search in France, where it's a city and a cellphone service provider).

When Google Trends launched, "we didn't think numbers were a key part of this," a Google spokeswoman told me. "A lot of people have requested numbers or some kind of quantitative data, so we thought we would listen to our user feedback."

Available at http://www.google.com/trends, the tool could well become a supplemental area to consider for those searching for appropriate keywords to use in search engine optimization or pay-per-click advertising. The numbers are not absolute, and the caveats do apply; but knowing what terms are popular and useful in your vertical can only be helpful to the savvy marketer.

And that's our take on the news today!

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