Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Three new products - Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook - advance the state of the art in search by helping users worldwide find and share more relevant information. The products all incorporate new capabilities that leverage user communities, enabling users to either share more information with others or benefit from other users' expertise to improve the accuracy of search results.
However, the most interesting of the bunch to our crew, is : Google Trends: [google.com...]
The company also introduced Google Trends, a new tool that enables users to examine billions of searches conducted on Google to gain insight into broad search patterns over time.
So the people searching for widgets 3 years ago now search for blue fluffy widgets.
Is there a source for that, or is this anecdotal?
Do a graph of a high rising keyword versus a steady one, or a keyword where news would make it rise real quickly. You will see that rises sometimes look exponential (like MySpace). This would most likely not happen if not linear, plus, logging the amount of traffic would not make sense at all.
About the normalization, that is a no-brainer.
A pity no-one at Google thought about accessibility. Turn off images to see what I mean. Or turn off styles to see the word "Loading..." appear.
I like the simple design here though.
I have always focused my business on the US, thinking it was the most important market -- according to trends, there four regions of the world that have more traffic than the US on my #1 keyword!
I'm not sure whether I trust it but this could have serious implication for my marketing/branding strategy.
The trends-tool deserves a thread of its own.
Frankly, this is the kind of info that would be very useful to SEO ... therefore G puts out a very limited tool that gives a tiny bit of info, and likely claims they're doing us a huge favor.
Consider it another way: Google wants to regain control of the SERPs by taking control away from SEOs. They would seem, then, to have a vested interest in ensuring we have less info to work with, not more (or less accurate). Kinda like how the site: and link: searches are less useful now than they used to be.
It's clearly limited to 3-word queries (for the most part), to "popular" queries, and to 5 at a time. It does rank thinks, probably logarithmically, but it doesn't give hard numbers.
For the internet and current events in general, sure this's interesting. For decisions on AdWords for <insert niche business> ... well, I'd get a 2nd opinion. And a 3rd. (notice the caveat: niche; if high-volume popular queries are a large chunk of your target audience, this will be more helpful for you ... YMMV)
On the upside, it's free, and universally available.
Actually NZ is surprisingly up there for a number of terms as the most popular region. Odd...
South Africans are more interested in Solar Power...
There's some pretty interesting info in there...
Also interesting trend for 'george bush' - 2005 has spike, has news article for reason of spike but spike for january 2006 - no news article. Looks to me like the news sites weren't so interested in his inaugural speech for 2006?
Is G becoming like GM?
Lots of products......
No, because they're not 'products'. They are experiments and little tools (to put it nicely).
G have a corporate intranet whereby employees are 'encouraged' to make suggestions. You don't get on without a minimum of 4 good suggestions that have been acted upon in some way. And by that I mean you don't even get an interview for a position without this on your record.
So, to answer the question, do they have lots of products? No, they have about a gazillion bad ideas made by desperate clones keen to get on. Also (and I'm taking a purist point of view here) I don't think it's right to call a motley collection of BETA projects products. None of them have roadmaps or timescales (like products do), and they are strictly for marketing purposes.
If you doubt this in any way then you'll have to explain why a cynical soul like me would spend time talking about Google in a forum - I am honest enough to admit that this form of marketing is very effective. However its effect is only to influence Google's position and perception in the marketplace. So 'toys' is definately more accurate (and fairly unpopular toys at that - I mean, do you know anyone who uses desktop, notepad, calendar or their Jabber client?).
Read [google.com...]
Just because the U.S. is fourth on the list of countries does not mean that there were more searches done for that keyword in the other three countries.
This shows keyword popularity by regions in this way: the popularity of the keyword in relation to all Google searches from that specific region or city.
Let's say there were 50 million searches for "widgets" in the US, but there were 50 billion total Google searches originating from the US. Let's say there's another country that had only 50 total Goolge searches, but 25 of those were for "widgets." The US, at 1:1000 would be ranked lower than the other country, at 1:2, when you search Trends for "widgets."
Don't go changing business models until you read the About page. And even then...
G have a corporate intranet whereby employees are 'encouraged' to make suggestions. You don't get on without a minimum of 4 good suggestions that have been acted upon in some way. And by that I mean you don't even get an interview for a position without this on your record.
Hi I want to support this with two G videos on video G com.
A.) Theoretical approach removed from groundwork maybe having actually EVER run websites on their own:
docid=-8618166999532839788&q=type%3Agoogle
20% rule, organic food, PhD etc.
Now compare that to a guy that really has to deal with a lot
B) Practical approach by a person on the ground:
docid=7747790812939045407&q=type%3Agoogle
Will people in A understand the millions of webmasters more likely in group B?
A) cares about organic food, theoretical technical stuff, 20% rules, nice shiny balls.
I am not against theory per se but it has to be both and I doubt 50% of Google staff had webservers their living depended on, before joining.
It will probably apply to Y! and MSN too. Big companies are big companies. :\
