Thursday, July 26, 2007

Google reveals popular searches

For years Google provided a service they called Zeitgeist which listed the popular searches for each month.

For example the top ten searches in July of 2001 were: wimbledon, tour de france, british open, morpheus, big brother 2, chandra levy, final fantasy, kazaa, max payne, and g8.

A couple months back Google came out with something they are calling Google Trends. This service provides more information. You can see the hot trends are for each day. Each day they'll list the top one hundred search patterns.

For example at the time I'm writing this post the number one pattern is weigh down. This is in reference to a diet plan called the Weigh Down Diet. Evidently CNN recently had a show on the diet plan. For each of the top 100 search patterns Hot Trends provides a cool page. The page has a graph showing the traffic for the search pattern. The graph shows that there was almost no traffic until about 6:00 AM today. By the time you check out the graph it will probably have peaked and started to drop off. The page also has links to News articles, blog posts and web sites mentioning the search pattern.

If you ever want to know what the rest of the world is looking for, Hot Trends is a fun site to see what they are searching for.


Google Trends will also let you compare two or more search patterns, for example education and school. Google Trends breaks this down by regions, cities, and languages. It was interesting to me that in Washington DC the searches were about ten times more for school than for education. In contrast New Delhi people search almost as much for education as for school.


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Technorati tags: Hot Trends, popular searches

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