This past day I've been playing around with the new born form Google: Google Trends. This is an interesting tool (reminds me of Technorati with the little graph on the left side) that allows to view the popularity of search keywords or phrases. It even allow comparisons.
As a picture often works better than words, see hereunder the search made for some Web Analytics solutions
Click on this link:
I won't get into detail of how to interpret the first graph (consult the Web Analytics Yahoo user group to learn more about this topic, I've just read a post from Jim Novo). What I find also interesting is the geo-segmentation possible. I find it very useful to understand how a trend works in different locations. I've chosen for example to list regions in the list underneath, this shows me the countries where Omniture is most searched in Google. And I can see for the top regions (countries) how WebTrends is positioned against Omniture
Something also interesting about this feature is that it would allow easily to understand how a global concept/trend has evolved over time in different locations. Imagine for example that you where able to understand how the, let's say, summer world hit has reached every country and at what pace. Hummmm, I know someone that would pay a lot for this kind of information. And imagine if they could use this information in a more granular way and they could track what was more popular in a city or a neighbourhood. Google aren't you willing to commercialise this kind of information? If you are you can contact me to become your partner in selling your info in Europe 😉 (And it could be completely anonymous, allowing you to respect completely your privacy policies ;-))
And if Google is not reselling the info, here's how you could build up your own lab 😉
Make an engine that will automatically make querries (you can also do this manually) on the target keywords and build up a database that you will afterwards use within a map (using different colours) and this would give you some useful geomarketing research analysis.
Please if you build one of those tools, keep me posted 😉
You can view what other think about Google Trend. Here's a random Blog: White African – a white african's view of the world
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