First Look: Google Trends

Are you familiar with the Google Zeitgeist? It's a regularly-updated part of the Google site that shows you trends that are becoming more and less popular, commentary, etc. There's a US version and other versions around the world.

Google Trends also shows you the popularity of searches, but you can specify what's being tracked, you can do comparisons, and you can greatly narrow down the timespan you're looking at. Google Trends is a lot of fun and you can try it at http://www.google.com/trends.

Start by entering a word, or enter many words separated by commas to do a comparison search. Here's one to try: one, two, three, four, five, six. You'll get a graph trending the searches over 2004, 2005, and 2006. In addition you also get pointers to news stories at certain times across the life of the graph. I didn't see how those really related to my one-two-three search, but it's a pretty generic search.

I decided I wanted to do a less-generic search with topical relevance. So I mixed an old American Idol favorite (Clay Aiken) with a new finalist (Taylor Hicks) in this search: "Clay Aiken", "Taylor Hicks". (Using quotes or not using quotes definitely makes a difference.) In the results, you can watch searches for Clay dwindle over time, but it's hard to see how the Taylor Hicks results change because they're only at the very end of the graph.

To see them more closely, use the dropdown menus on the right to narrow the time on the graph to a specific year or month. Narrowing your results to just 2006 does show you how the two searches are trending. You can also narrow your results by region, though if there isn't enough search volume in a region you'll get an error message and no graph.

Beneath the graph you can also get some additional ways to narrow your results, including graphs of your search by region (apparently folks in Singapore are really interested in Clay Aiken!), cities, and languages. Looking at those you might notice, for example, that while Term A might be trending higher than Term B, Term B might actually be getting more search volume in a particular region or in a particular language.

Be aware that Google Trends will attempt to trend the volume of any possible Google search, so you can have fun with the special syntax, omit words, etc. The search "Clay Aiken" -Idol is a legit search and will get you a graph of search trends. On the other hand, "Clay Aiken" -Idol "Christmas Songs" is too specific and will generate an error message.

Hmmm... the search "Clay Aiken", "Taylor Hicks", "Ryan Seacrest" is particularly interesting -- Ryan's search volume is almost flat, with just the slightest of curves.

For lots of culturemining fun, play with Google Trends in conjunction with the Icerocket Blogs Trend Tool. While Google Trends monitors searches, the Icerocket tool monitors mentions. It'd be a lot of fun to play with the two tools for an hour or three and see if any correlations could be drawn between increasing/decreasing volume of blog mentions and searches.

Posted to Search Engines-Google