I came across another of Google's tools. I think it is still in its Beta, but so what? Even GMail is in Beta.

Any way, you should check out Google Trends.
You can given in keywords and it gives statistics on the search done with lot of associated demographics if it gets a sizeable sample for that keyword.



Now, what use this could be for lay users? I am not sure.
But this is how I hypothesize I can use it.

I basically publish articles in my blog 'Splat!', and it has few categories (Nature, Art and Design, World-building...). If I am able to key in these category or some other keyword that belongs to the category set, I should be able to see how the world's interest in that topic is doing. I am not sure if I can exactly map the demographics of Google to my own visitors. I do not think I can do that now, because I do not get a lot many visitors. But once I do that, I should be able to say if the article I write is of any relevance to everyone else or not.

I am not sure if I am getting the process exactly right with the above hypothesis of mine - but I would like to know the views of you all in this approach.

 

 

 

Reply

This is really great, once I was dreaming of such a tool which would show this kind of information, but I would want it to work a little bit differently.. I am really interested of what people is searching on through google, except for porno and stuff associated with it that I could know what kind of content to write and how to get more visitors from search engines. Thanks for the link

Reply

It is a pretty interesting site, not that I can really use it 'for business' though.

I find the graphs a bit limiting in suplying data. If you search for example for "failure" it shows a bigger graph for norwegian which I find pretty strange.
Or a very big graph for "St Albans, United Kingdom" when I check health. I guess I'm not entirely sure how this thing works and thus should be used to get valuable information from it.
If you use this trend site as a big reference to what you should put on your website I'd be careful if I were you ; )
I find the bottle pretty weird for an 'L'


One interesting feature of google search though is google history, although it doesn't record all the searches you do with the built-in search box of Firefox.

Reply

Sigh ... typed in 'Abhiram' and it says 'Not enough volume to generate graph'.

Hmph! One day I'll be famous and generate more search volume than Britney Spears herself! .

Reply

Well Alegis, that is what I thought when I tried few kewords on their engine. Then, I thought, I must be a bit stupid and not using the tool properly. So, I put it up here in the forums so that I can get other view points.

I am not sure how one may use this. Atleast, I think they need to get more volume of data into the samples for it to be useful.

Reply

Hum. I think that's because it's trying to say that the most people who searched the term "health" came from St. Albans, United Kingdom, hence the label "Top Cities" above it. On the other hand though, Google should probably have a little explanation guide next to it so that people will have an easier time understanding what's going on instead of just spewing forth a bunch of graphs. Otherwise they'd just lose users.

I like the sort by country feature though...but I think it'd be nicer if they let us sort by language as well; since there are going to be some sites that want to target a language rather than just a country. Like I would want to compare most of the English speaking countries for my website (as that is the primary language), but I can't do that with Google Trends.


Yeah, that's true. They need a lot more data in there. I guess they only have the most data for the countries that have the largest amount of people searching for a certain term. I guess it might be useful to some people for business (it depends on what sector you work in and how popular your job is, as if it's really trendy, it'll probably have more data at Google Trends...:3).

 

 

 

Reply

Interesting, you can see from what location are the people that search for with specific keyword... It's good for targeting your website better, and maybe choosing keywords that suit your website...

Reply

Hmmm... I did not think about it like that earlier. So, for a particular keyword, it shows which part of the world people are more interested in, and with that we can target something specific to that geography - right?

Oh boy! This demographic analysis is a real head-wrenching one!

Reply