Searching Search Histories: Trends and Topix

September 14, 2006 by: Lisa Melvin

Google Trends, a relatively new Google Labs product, received pretty good attention as search marketers discussed the advantages of gaining insight into broad search patterns. If you’ve never visited Google Trends, you ought to. It’s fairly addictive to look at different search trends and , even though Google warns that it is “based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results,” it’s can be insightful at times (particularly when entrenched in keyword research).

With Google Trends you can also compare several terms at a time, limit the search dates or geogrpahical regions and peruse related Google News stories as well. For an idea of what kind of information you can discover, try looking at the Trends search results for Steve Irwin, the Animal Planet’s popular Crocodile Hunter whose recent death has made global news. In the example search, you’ll see that Google Trends gives a histogram that goes through about June of 2006.

Google Trend’s Histogram:

The Google Trends results page gives you news stories to the right of the histogram (marked in the timeline) beginning with a story from January 5th, 2004 and ending with a story from January 16th, 2006. Although it’s nice of Google to throw in the related news coverage, their news search function gives better results (approximately 7,550 Steve Irwin articles currently listed on the search results page today).

Notice, too, that below the histogram on the Trends search results page, Google paralells the search volume line with a news reference volume line. Below that, Google tells you that more searches are done for his name in Brisbane, Australia than any where else (which makes sense given Steve Irwin owned the Australian zoo near Brisbane). By clicking the “Regions” tab you can see Norway performs the second highest number of searches and that the United States is seventh on the list of regional popularity in the numbers of searches for Steve Irwin. Google also gives you the ability to perform simultaneous term searches. For example, you can search for Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, and be given a graph with blue noting one term and red noting another. This Trends search gives you the knowledge that searchers in Australia look for Steve Irwin whilei folks in Maylasia and South Africa are more apt to search for crocodile hunter. However, remember that Google is showing you searches performed up to June of 2006. Steve Irwin’s tragic sting ray encounter just happened on September 4th.

Here’s where the latest news from Topix.net comes in handy.

With the recent redesign of the news site, they’ve added a really cool feature; a “click-o-gram” (their interactive histogram) that’s offers more up-to-date information than the Google Trends histogram. The data features results from today and goes back a year in time. Although you’re not really searching search trends, you are searching the news trends, making the insight very similar to Google Trends search insight, giving you a really good peek at what’s popular when on the Internet. If you don’t believe me, try various Trend searches on Google and notice how the news reference volume line often mimics the search volume line.

Searching on Topix.net for Steve Irwin gives a more complete and up-to-date picture of the current spike about the famous crocodile hunter in popularity and fills you in on the latest news.

Topix.net’s Click-O-Gram:

As you can see, Topix.net lists about 119,000 articles beginning with a story released 21 minutes ago. Very neat, indeed. You can also select to show only blogs or news results if you care to focus the results. Searching on Steve Irwin, Crocodile Hunter here does not break the results into superimposed results of the two terms. Instead you’ll get results limited to those that include both terms.

They also mention in their own weblog coverage of the new interface that “for the true search geek, we’re giving you case sensitive search on those results - enabling searches for news about “IT” that were not previously possible.” Using their own example, a search for bush -Bush gives you results that limit the meaning to shrubs, not the President. That’s pretty neat! Ironically, today’s search reveals another Steve Irwin article since “the bush” is term often used to describe Australia. Trying that on Google Trends didn’t exactly work. Both searches (one for bush and one for Bush) led to the same results, citing President Bush articles.

Using Google Trends or Topix.net searches can be very useful for Search Marketers.

Use Google Trends to:

• discover what geographic region searches more for a particular term
• compare search popularity among five terms at a time
• view how the popularity of a term has grown over a longer period of time than a year

Use Topix.net to:

• look at the most recent, up-to-date popularity news trends for a particular term
• have more control over case sensitive searches
• more easily eliminate what you don’t want to see in the search results
• visualize trends in news and/or blogs

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