Google Trends Labs - Hot New Search Feature

    Google Trends Labs, Google's newest search feature, has given them a leg up in competing for Internet search engine users. The new feature is free to use, easy to operate and by typing in just a few search words you can discover how many other people have been searching for the same topic, person, place or thing.

    You simply type in a word and then see the results of the world's interest in the same word you typed. Compare interests in up to five topics at a time and view how often other people have searched for the same topics. It will also show you how often your word or topic has appeared in news stories (marked on the graph and convenient links to the news stories in a sidebar) and how popular the search was in geographic areas. This site enables users to change the geographic area, narrowing it down to a state if you prefer, and change the time frame too--choose 30 days, the last 12 months or even for certain months dating back to 2007.

    As an example, a search using three different keywords was performed. Keywords were advertising, Halloween costumes and Glenn Beck and all were set for the last 30 days. A graph appeared with the results, marking news articles and providing links to them and the top ten under the categories Subregion (state), City and Language were also displayed. Of course, when narrowing a search down to a single state, the subregion (state) doesn't appear, but the city and language categories still do. The results were interesting:

Advertising: Top subregion, city and language respectively were; North Carolina, Raleigh, NC and English.

Halloween Costumes: Top subregion, city and language respectively were; Louisiana, Oklahoma City, OK and English.  (Note: When narrowed down to WA State; Spokane, WA came out as the top city for people querying about Halloween costumes. This information could be quite helpful in trying to decide the best city to sell your seasonal Halloween costumes in.)

Glenn Beck: The top 3 states were; Utah, Idaho and Washington. The top 3 cities were Salt Lake City, Oklahoma City and Seattle. English was the prime language in all. However, if you change the search to Washington State you discover the most queries about Beck came from Tacoma, Spokane, Renton, Seattle and Kirkland respectively. Change the date to the 12 months and the cities change again.

    Hot Trends, is also available as a snapshot of the top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the United States and it is updated every hour--talk about current data. You get a clear view of what people are searching for at Google at any given moment.

    Data can be exported into .csv files, which can generally be opened by most spreadsheets. The information will provide quick, easy compilation to people for business marketing purposes, anazlying target consumers, to help writers discover popular topics for articles/web content or for anyone who wants to keep on top of the latest trends.

    Google states at its site Google Trends Labs is currently available in English and Chinese, but they plan to broaden it in the future to include other languages.  The company assures people who use Google that their information and privacy remains private. The data is based on all searches at Google.com.

    To learn more about Google Trends Labs visit http://www.google.com/intl/en/trends/about.html#18 and if you just can't wait to give it a try (and hate reading directions) go to http://www.google.com/trends