Did you know Google has an amazing research tool that will allow you to research how often people search your favorite topics?
It's called Google Trends.
Google Trends allows you to enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. In addition, Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often.
How cool is that?
Here's how Google Trends works:
Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. Results come back in the form of a search-volume graph - plotted on a linear scale.
Located just beneath the search-volume graph is Google's news-reference-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, only English-language headlines are displayed, but Google hopes to support non-English headlines in the future.
Below the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends displays the top cities, regions, and languages for the first term you entered.
When the "Cities" tab is selected, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which they received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities' ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.
The Regions and Languages tabs work just like the Cities tab. Google Trends uses IP address information from Googles own server logs to make a guess-timate about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.
It's important to keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn't on the Top Regions list for the term "haircut" doesn't necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society's conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for "haircut" make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions.
A word of warning: Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means that it's still in the early stage of development. The data Google Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that Trends makes use of.
In closing, While Google Trends is a pretty cool tool with plenty of potential, until Google Labs irons out the kinks, it's best used for entertainment purposes only.
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