After launching Google Trends in 2006 to great fanfare, Google has been busy developing additional layers that help users better view the world's Internet activities. Google Trends for Websites is the newest tool in the shed. It lets people see just how popular individual websites are by ranking them across different geographical regions and comparing them to other related sites. This article will cover the pros and cons of Google's latest web tracker.
In case you were wondering, Google Trends is one of the tools being explored in Google Labs. In a nutshell, it displays data about how often a search term is entered relative to the total number of searches and across various geographical regions from the beginning of 2004 to now. The first thing you'll notice is a line graph; however, below that you'll find different break downs based on region, city, and language. You can refine the data in the graph by region and time period while comparing up to five search terms at a time.
One of its more interesting applications is using the “News reference volume” graph to see how specific events or times of year affect search popularity. Unfortunately, I'm writing this article the day after legendary comedian George Carlin passed away, so his name is the most popular search term for June 23, 2008. Likewise, a search for certain holidays, like Ramadan or Pesach (Passover), will show peaks during their respective seasons.
This brings me to Google Hot Trends, which, as you might guess, is an addition to Google Trends that shows the top 100 searches of the past hour. Its graph covers the past 24 hours and it shows the latest news articles, blog posts, and web search results. Using both tools, you can see how running a query of Ramadan in Google Trends would show the term peaking around the end of September/early October in each year. It would also show up on Hot Trends whenever the official start of Ramadan happened to be that year.
You can learn much more about Google Trends by visiting its About page. Right now though, I'm going to move on to Google Trends for Websites. Read ahead to see how this new tool looks to improve on present website tracking technology by providing more than just traffic data.
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