Google Labs has launched a new search tool, Google Trends. It displays relative search volumes over time (from 2004 onward) for a set of user defined keywords and keyword phrases. Google Trends joins Google Zeitgeist, a static snapshot of top search trends.
In some cases, news events are presented with the search volume, providing insight into the events driving spikes in user searches. Try a search on google, yahoo, bing and ask to see how this works. If the data is accurate, Italy is second only to the UK in searches for Viagra.
While the possibilities are very interesting, a clear disclaimer warns:
It is based upon just a portion of our searches, and several approximations are used when computing your results. Please keep this in mind when using it.
How accurate and reliable is it?
Unfortunately, Google has a history of offering great tools with their full potential crippled by a reluctance to share what it knows. A Google knowledge sharing paradox.
Setting false expectations: Google’s unresolved knowledge sharing conflict
Google wants to catalog the world’s information. Like the traditional catalogers, librarians, Google wants to help us find information. Google teaches how the card catalog is composed, the different ways to search it (title, author, subject – remember?). So far, so good. But then Google finds itself in a quandary: it is afraid bad people out there will try to harm the catalog. So Google the librarian, dutifully teaching us how the catalog is updated, how we can help make our web sites search engine friendly, is conflicted with the Google who wants to keep everything in the “special collections area“.
Consider a few examples, starting with link tool, link:www.mysite.com. When a company of Google’s stature decides it can no longer provide accurate results because said results are subject to misuse, they are faced with three choices:
- withdraw the tool,
- cripple it, documenting the fact,
- cripple it.
It seems Google choose the 3rd option, rending the tool not only useless, but also highly misleading, doing a disservice to both Google’s users and Google itself.
This same lack of transparency plagues other Google initiatives such as the otherwise excellent sitemaps program. The famous Google PageRank appears in middle of the stats, PageRank distribution for site pages. Unfortunately, no one seems to know how often, if ever, it is updated.
In February, the sitemaps team announced the inclusion of “Common Words” stats. What they didn’t say is that this information is only available for some sites, presumably better performing sites. There have been vague notes of “…as we find out more about your site…” which imparts a false hope that it is just an issue of a bit of patience. While Google needs to limit where it expends computing resources, they set up false expectations though overly opaque communication. More candor is needed.
Google Suggest, now incorporated in the Firefox browser toolbar, implies a certain freshness by providing real time suggestions. While it is understandable that Google needs to cache queries, it appears data hasn’t been updated for more than 6 months (verified for non-English terms). While Google Suggest is an excellent tool, we’d like to to know how stale the search information is. We’d also like to see it rolled out in other languages.
Returning to the Google Trends tool, several very interesting uses spring to mind; it remains to be seen how valid the tool will be for strategic search engine optimization keyword research. Are the data skew factors sector specific? Country specific? Will Google cripple it further?
Updated 2009-06-11: See Google Insights for search as well. MSN is now Bing.
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Sean Carlos is a web marketing consultant & teacher, assisting companies with their Search (SEO + PPC = SEM), Social Media & Digital Media Measurement strategies. Sean first worked with text indexing in 1990 in a project for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Since then he worked for Hewlett-Packard Consulting and later as IT Manager of a real estate website before founding Antezeta in 2006. Sean is an 
Searching for vi**a I see Sweden in the top spot…. Meanwhile the largest city is Brentford, UK with a population of only 100,000 very strange, great post Sean