Google Trends is great for tracking (and comparing) individual keywords. But what if you want to see results for a broader category, or a general idea, rather than for individual products or for specific instances of the idea?
In your everyday Google search, ANDs are assumed automatically while ORs must be specified. So if I search for “orange juice” concentrate, I’ll get only pages that have both the phrase “orange juice” and the word concentrate in them. If I want pages with either “orange juice” or concentrate, I’ll do an OR search for “orange juice” OR concentrate. Finally, if I do a search for orange juice OR concentrate, there’s an assumed AND that applies to both juice and concentrate, so I’ll only get pages with the phrase “orange juice” or “orange concentrate” in them.
In Google Trends, you can’t specify which operators to search for. The keywords are all transformed into lowercase, so the operator OR will look just like the word or. There are, however, operators you can use in your search of Google searches.
Read the rest of this entry »
Facebook Lexicon is another online tool to analyze trends in words over time. But while Google Trends shows query-based trends, Facebook Lexicon demonstrates content-based trends.
For those of you who really don’t know, Facebook is a social networking tool that transports your circle of friends to an online arena. Says their About page, “Facebook is a social utility that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them.” One of the most basic feature is that every user has a Wall on his profile page, and his friends come by, write a message on his Wall and read all the other messages on his Wall. When a friend writes specifically on one user’s Wall, all of the user’s other friends can see that post.
In addition, Groups and Events have Walls that anybody in that group or event, or anybody on Facebook depending on the group or event settings, can write on. So it acts as sort of a community forum.
Facebook Lexicon, like Google Trends to which I have already introduced you, shows the frequency of different words or phrases on Wall posts. The key difference here is that Facebook Lexicon looks at posted words, words that other users write in messages, rather than words they use on a search. It’s what they’re talking about, not what they’re looking for.
Read the rest of this entry »
Google recently announced that they have indexed over 1 trillion unique web pages. You might remember a similar announcement in 2000, when their index hit one billion.
The post brings up a good question about the Web that all search engines must consider: what defines a unique page? Two different URLs could link to or be copies of the same page. Dynamic applications might have a “next” feature that could continue ad infinitum (Google’s example is a calendar), but does that mean there’s really an infinite number of (useful) unique web pages? And plenty of base URLs with a different query string would show totally different content, meaning the base URL itself is not enough to define uniqueness.
The post itself is worth a read. It’s both historic and interesting.
This is my final introductory post for Google Trends. Previous posts dealt with the scaling and normalizing of data (Part One) and comparing terms across regions (Part Two).
Today I’m just going to talk about exporting data. This is a new feature in Google Trends and is only available if you sign in with your free Google account.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here’s part two of my introduction to Google Trends. Last post we only dealt with the main line graph of search volume — this time we’re going to look at the Regions, Cities and Languages charts. We’ll also compare multiple search terms and unleash the true Power of the Trends. Or something equally awe-inspiring.
When you look at the results for facebook over the past twelve months, you’ll see three bar graphs at the bottom of the page. These charts are very minimalist:
Google Trends Regions: Keyword facebook, Past Year
South Africa? Yes, back in October 2007, Facebook rose above Google as the number one most trafficked site in South Africa, according to Alexa, although it’s back to number 2 now (with Google.co.za at the top and Google.com as #3). And if you look at the past month graph instead, it’s Columbia and Croatia that are at the top. Intuitively, it makes sense that countries experiencing a Facebook boom would show up higher than countries like the US, even though you might expect that countries like the US use Facebook more (especially since it originated here in the States). The reason boom-countries show up higher, I speculate, is that if you’re going to Facebook, you go to facebook.com — you don’t type “facebook” into Google. But if you’re hearing that your friends, or your children, or your neighbors are all on this “facebook” you keep hearing about, you’re gonna type it into Google (or whatever search engine). With a big enough boom, that’ll generate enough search volume for that region and beat out regions like the US and the UK.
It’s not quite that simple, though. Read the rest of this entry »
Google Trends is, as the logo suggests, still a part of Google Labs, making it a sister tool to Google Suggest, Google Mars and Google Sets. With Google Trends, you can track the popularity of search terms, or keywords, over time. I used this tool last month to try correlating Google Trends results with the US primaries, which generated a lot of response — much of it quite negative. My approach was just a quick look to satisfy my curiosity, and admittedly had little in the way of statistical verification — perhaps I should have waited for Google to provide better data before releasing my findings. (Google did, however, soon debut the Google 2008 US Election Trends, so they agree that Google Trends results might be at least somewhat interesting in general.)
Before getting into a detailed explanation of Google Trends, I’ll show you the graph of searches for the search term facebook, an example we’ll be using throughout this article:
Google Trends: Keyword facebook, All Regions, All Years
This chart, like all on Google Trends for Searches, includes two parts: Search Volume Index and News Reference Volume. The top one displays search volume, and that’s the one we’ll focus on here. In a nutshell, the search volume graph shows the popularity of Google searches for the term facebook over time. Those flags, A-F, give various news headlines that may have contributed to spikes in the news volume graph.
The main problem lies in defining the “popularity” of a search term. According to the About page, all data from Google Trends are normalized. They’re unclear about exactly how they do that, but basically, the data is all relative. The chart above shows the relative popularity of the term facebook, not just the number of searches in which the term is used. So if the popularity of the search for facebook increases, the graph is going to go up. Now, if people stop searching for other terms like myspace and linkedin, then the total number of Google searches is going to decrease and the graph for facebook is going to increase, even if the number of searches for that particular keyword don’t change, because it’s relatively more popular; it’s takes up a higher percentage of all Google searches.
Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome to TrendsLog’s first post!
The tubes, of course, abound with valuable information (and plenty of less-than-valuable content). Like in a university library, visitors can search for, access, and digest all the knowledge they want. Like in an international newspaper, subscribers can browse and read articles about all sorts of current events. Like on cable television, viewers can select from and watch millions of channels and videos. Like in a community forum, participants can debate, discuss and dispense their opinions.
But unlike these physical information sources, the tubes give us something even more valuable — meta-tubes. Who knows which books students read in libraries? The best we can do is look at their checkout records, which isn’t usually legal. Who knows which newspaper articles the average homeowner reads? Who knows which videos couch potatoes like best? On the Internet, we know. Usage can be logged, pageviews can be recorded, searches can be aggregated — if we know where to look.
Google Trends offers detailed information on which keywords searchers use on The Google. What can we do with information on who’s looking for what? For starters, candidates can see how successful their campaigns are. Coke can compare itself to Pepsi. Defense attorneys can finally even define community standards in the Miller test for obscenity, because Google knows people are really interested in, what words are searched for and how those searches are made, an invaluable metric in the online world. It’s like Google can read your mind — and everyone else’s.
Google’s offerings are particularly relevant due to the search engine’s massive popularity, reaching almost a third of the global Internet population daily. But there are other tools out there. If Google shows you what people are looking for, Facebook can show you what they’re talking about. Facebook Lexicon, like Google Trends, graphs the popularity of words and phrases. But where Google Trends is query-based, showing data about what people are researching, Facebook Lexicon is content-based, giving insights into what people are talking about. Will it be Obama or McCain? Who’s got the most widely discussed electronics? What’s going to be a box office hit?
The Internet delivers a radically new medium of content. Every action can be tracked, and those actions, properly aggregated and sliced, can give advertisers, politicians and citizens unprecedented amounts of actionable data. But before we can take action, we must first understand this data. Scope must be determined; limitations must be acknowledged. Sources must be mined; observations must be corroborated.
And trends must be analyzed.