Oxymoronic Google Trends

Randall Munroe from xkcd imagines some correlations between Google searches and people that are unlikely to use them. The #1 US state for [men kissing] is indeed Utah, but the other correlations are made up.


Tip: track the fastest rising queries from your region using the Insight for Search gadget.

{ Image licensed as Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial. }

Google Hot Trends, Christmas Edition 2008

Google Hot Trends shows the searches that have suddenly become popular in the US. It's always interesting to see what are the "hottest" queries on Christmas Day, when many people open their presents and then use Google to find information about them.


Check the "hot trends" list and see if there's any change from last year. iTunes seems to dominate the list of popular queries: [www.itunes.com downloads], [itunes download], [itunes store], so Apple's iPhone and iPod continue to sell well.

According to Google Zeitgeist, the fastest rising query for 2008 was [Sarah Palin], followed by [beijing 2008], [facebook login], [tuenti]*, [Heath Ledger] and [Obama]. Google continues to be popular: [orkut] is the most popular query in Brazil and India, [youtube] is the most popular query in France, Spain, Italy and Mexico, the fastest rising query in Denmark was [google oversætter]**, while in Australia, the home country of Google Maps, the third fastest rising search was... [google maps].

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* "Tuenti is a Madrid-based, invite only private social networking website that has been referred to as the Spanish Facebook," according to Wikipedia.

** Google Translate

Google Search Insights

Google Trends is useful if you want to compare the popularity of two or more search terms, but it can't generate lists with popular search terms from a category, like in Google Zeitgeist. You need to provide the search terms and adjust them until you found the most popular keywords, but this is time consuming and ineffective.

Google Insights for Search categorizes searches and shows popular queries from a category like Telecommunications, popular queries from a certain country or from a specific date range. You can use it to find answers to questions like:

* what are the most popular cars in the US this year?
* what are the top searches in France for the past 30 days?
* which file sharing services were the most popular in 2007?
* what was the distribution of the Google searches for iPhone in the US last month?
* what are the top searches related to Google this year?


The service has been created with the advertisers in mind and has many potential business uses: examining seasonality, comparing synonyms, finding regions that are interested in a certain product.

To group multiple keywords, separate them using +. To compare two or more keywords, click on "Add search term" or separate the keywords using a comma.

Google Trends Shows Traffic Stats

Google Trends no longer displays only information about searches, now you can use it to compare the daily unique visitors for two or more sites. To see the actual numbers, you need to log in using a Google account.

It's interesting to find the sources used by Google to estimate the traffic of a web site. According to the help page, "Trends for Websites combines information from a variety of sources, such as aggregated Google search data, aggregated opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. (...) Additionally, Google Trends for Websites only shows results for sites that receive a significant amount of traffic, and enforces minimum thresholds for inclusion in the tool."

For example, Google Trends estimates that the number of daily visitors for Facebook.com is 30 million, 3 times bigger than one year ago. You can also find the countries where a site is popular, related sites and searches.


One interesting tidbit: you can't see traffic data for most Google sites, although there are some exceptions. "We have policy of not providing interim financial guidance, and have decided not to release Google numbers in accordance with that policy," explained a Google spokesperson. I don't think this makes sense, as Google wouldn't release its internal traffic data, but only a rough estimation.

Google's blog for webmasters warns that the data may not be very accurate. "Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a Google Labs product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources you rely on for web traffic information."

There are other services that show web traffic stats: Compete, Quantcast (for US traffic), Alexa, but it's difficult to compare Google's data with the information provided by those services because they use different measures: daily uniques vs monthly uniques, actual numbers vs reach, worldwide visitors vs US visitors.

Google Trends with Numbers

Google Trends, the service that compares the volume of searches, has been updated to show numbers on the vertical axis. "These numbers don't refer to exact search-volume figures. Instead, in the same way that a map might scale to a certain size, Google Trends scales the first term you've entered so that its average search volume is 1.00 in the chosen time period," explains Google Blog.


Now that you can compare more accurately the popularity of up to five search terms, there's also an option to download the data as a CSV file: http://www.google.com/trends/viz?q=QUERY&graph=all_csv. The file actually contains values separated by tabs, so change the extension to tsv before uploading it to Google Spreadsheets.


Google doesn't show absolute numbers for competitive reasons, but also because those numbers wouldn't be exact. "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."

The new features are available only if you sign in, probably to protect against automatic data download. If you try to download a CSV file without being logged in, you'll get a file that contains this message: "You must be signed in to export data from Google Trend". An API would've been a better idea.