G-Metrics Measures Google Results Across Time

You might be interested in the popularity of keywords in Google for a variety of reasons -- you might be doing research on a technology, or you might be trying to optimize your page and get a sense of how many other people are using the word you want to use. G-Metrics ( http://g-metrics.com/ ) is a service allowing you to track the number of results for a keyword over time.

To use it you'll need to register (just name and e-mail). When you register you'll be sent a "key" by e-mail; this is what you use to log in. When you log in you're presented with the list of keywords from the front page, which you can add to your own watch list (more about those in a minute.) You can also generate your own queries to add to a watch list. Any query you can run with the Google API is a legit query, which means any query except special searches for phone numbers, news searches (pity), etc. I searched for the keyword weblog across three different top-level domains (us, uk, and gov.) Now I'll have to wait for my searches to populate over time. (Since you can run daterange: searches with the API, it would be nice if G-Metrics would immediately run a search that covers, say, the last ten days for your query.) You can of course log back into the site to check out how your queries are doing or you can get an RSS feed.

Want to see what more fleshed out queries look like? Go back to the front page. You'll see a selection of queries which seem to go back to the beginning of July (is Afghanistan spelled wrong on purpose?) You can add these to your own query list if you're registered. Click on one of them and you'll get the last ten days' worth of result numbers and a graph of the numbers back to the beginning of July.

You can also download the numbers in tab-delimited format, which answers one of the things I'd like to do -- map several queries on the same graph to compare them. (If you have the results in tab-delimited format you can put them in a spreadsheet and do it yourself.) It'd also be nice if there were a "control" search available that would give you an idea of the number of English-language pages in Google in the first place, so you could have a sense of how the whole index is growing as compared to your query. (You can, for example, run a Google search for "the," which at this writing will return you almost six billion results.) I'd also like to see a hook into PopDex or some other popularity-measuring application so you could quickly pull out names (JibJab?) and dump them into the application to see how fast memes grow. Interesting, potentially very useful, worth a look.

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