May 22, 2007

Google Tracking Hot Trends

Google has been regularly tracking popular searches in the form of the Google Zeitgeist for some time, and added the Google Trends service last year, providing an unfiltered, uncategorized view of popular queries in relation to each other.

Now, Google has introduced a new tool called Hot Trends. "It's a new feature of Google Trends for sharing the the hottest current searches with you in very close to real time," according to the Google Blog post. It's also added a Hot Trends group to help decipher the reasons why some seemingly odd phrases are appearing in Hot Trends.

Hot Trends are not a straight list of most popular searches, but are ranked with a new algorithm: Hot Trends aren't the search terms people look for most often -- those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games] or perhaps [myspace]. Yes, [sex] too. Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic. And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.

Google has also updated the Google Trends page to make it easier to break trends down by geographic region, for example. It's also ending its weekly Zeitgeist, but will continue monthly and annual publications.

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 1:47 PM | Permalink

March 6, 2007

The Intersection of Social Search & Pop Culture

That's what social search is really about, isn't it? The reflection of trends and conversation among related entities. Celebrity searches and following the trends in pop culture are nothing new in search of course, and the search engines have been publishing popular searches for years now. Just go to Google Zeitgeist, Yahoo Buzz, the Lycos 50, and AOL Hot Searches, and you can see what's popular in search at any given time.

File this under Tuesday's just for fun blog post, since tonight marks Week 3 of competition on American Idol , it's only appropriate to talk about how the scandal surrounding one contestant has influenced results in each search engine.

American Idol contestant Antonella Barba, of Point Pleasant, New Jersey, has earned the title of the fastest rising star of Internet controversy, as the blogoshere and popular media are focused on racy photos of her circulating around the Web.

On the Lycos 50, she's just edged out the number of searches for MySpace (YouTube, Facebook, and others are further down the list), reaching the #1 most searched for spot, and tops this week's Google Zeitgeist. On Yahoo! Buzz, she's second only to Britney Spears.

It's clear that viral factors influence the rise of these types of scandals, and in Google's search results for Antonella, Technorati tops the list with results tagged for the popstar wannabe and AI related terms. More interesting, of course, is how Google automatcially inserts the second most popular alternative query for a related search: "See results for: antonella barba pictures". Now that's relevancy for you!

Meanwhile, Yahoo's results for similar queries take advantage of the chatter on the topic over at Yahoo Answers, with the top three results integrated into the standard Y! SERPs.

Perhaps most encouraging though, is the adoption of related Pay Per Click ads for Cingular Wireless, official sponsor of American Idol. Sponsored links for the big brand pop up as well as an ad by FOX, promoting the show. That's progress. Of course, there's also several sponsored links to ringtone sellers and other sites promoting the actual pictures. That's less surprising.

Posted by Elisabeth Osmeloski at 1:42 PM | Permalink

December 29, 2006

Google Zeitgeist: Popular Does Not Mean Most Frequently Searched

As it turns out, Google's annual Zeitgeist, which purports to list "the most popular and fastest-rising global search terms", according to the accompanying announcement, doesn't really measure anything.

After Danny and several other bloggers wondered how a term like "bebo" and "myspace" could top the list without other brands, and common search terms being above them, Google has changed the language describing the Zeitgeist to reflect its focus as a comparison of search terms' popularity between last year and this year.

Google's engineers have shared some insight into the Zeitgeist data.

According to Artem Boytsov, a Google software engineer, instead of listing off boring top search terms like "dictionary", "maps" or a litany of pornographic terms, "we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 -- the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over. To come up with this list, we looked at several thousand of 2006's most popular searches, and ranked them based on how much their popularity increased compared to 2005."

Posted by Kevin Newcomb at 12:46 PM | Permalink

December 18, 2006

2006 Top Searches

Following Yahoo's release on December 4 of its top searches for 2006, last week AOL, Lycos and MSN Live released their top searches for the year 2006. Google still has their 2005 review at Zeitgeist, along with recent monthly totals. Ask.com presents weekly lists, but has yet to release a 2006 year in review.

A closer look at these lists reveals some interesting questions about the differences in the data from engine to engine.

Looking at the slight differences between this data can be an interesting project, and can probably yield some good insight into both the user demographics of each of the engines

Paris Hilton is an interesting example to use in showing how search engines classify types of searches. In Yahoo! and in AOL, Paris is listed as a celebrity, yet she is found in top News searches for MSN Live. Does this mean that people search Live's (formerly search.msn.com) News category when they look for everyone's favorite socialite?

More can undoubtedly be read into the top overall searches reported for each portal. AOL reports: "weather" (does this mean they included all weather-inclusive searches or just the term "weather?"); Yahoo! says Britney Spears is number one (hmm...wonder if that includes people misspelling it?); MSN Live claims that the world wanted to know about Ronaldinho more than anyone or thing else; and Lycos puts Poker at number one. Again, others can fill in the blanks as to what they think the demographics most closely associated with each portal are.

It will be interesting to see what the top Google searches are. It would also be nice to have some more details as to how many misspellings were included in searches and perhaps how many of the searches for each top term were actually contained in a longer keyword phrase.

See also the discussions about this at the Yahoo! Search Blog, and the MSN Blog post that introduced their list. AOL has opened up the floor for discussion at the AOL Search Blog (thanks Susan for the link!). Lycos provides a platform for discussion which can be found at the Lycos 50 Blog. (Thanks Carolyn!)

(Note this story was edited after I discovered that Paris Hilton did make the top celebrity list at AOL. For some reason I missed that originally. Apologies to the AOL team for this oversight. CB)

Posted by Chris Boggs at 10:58 AM | Permalink

May 10, 2006

Google Trends: Peer Into Google's Database Of Searches

Now live via Google Labs is a new Google Trends service, announced today as part of Google Press Day. The service allows you to tap into Google's database of searches, to determine what's popular. For example, do a trends query on cars, and you can see the volume of queries over time, by city, regions, languages and so on.

Let's take a single search first and go through the motions. A query on ipod gives a chart going back through January 2004, which is as far back as Google Trends data goes. You can see spikes in searches, and these are often labeled with letters that lead to related news items. Google says it is using similar technology to do this as it does with company price charts in Google Finance.

Below the chart, you get some geographical and regional data. For example, you'll see most iPod searches are happening in New York, then in Irvine, then San Francisco, London and so on. That's the city data. Next is a Regional option, which gives you a breakdown by country (iPod searches are big in the UK then the US and Australia). Finally, you can narrow by language (Most searches for iPod are done in English, then Japanese).

Want to narrow in? You can do a variety of things. Using the drop down boxes, you can pick a particular month, such as last month. You can also pick a particular region, like last month just in the United States.

You aren't limited to single words. Enter multiple words by commas to do comparisons, such as google,yahoo,microsoft. That query shows you each term in a different color, and you can then see all the breakdowns for each word, as well. You can do up to five words in total. Want to do multiword queries? There's ways to do that -- check out the help page for more.

Sometimes when you do a search, you'll get something like this message:

Your terms - larry page - do not have enough search volume to show graphs.

What's happening here is that Google's working to help protect search privacy. There's a slight chance someone might enter something like their own name along with something embarrassing or private. Potentially, Google Trends could reveal this information.

My Private Searches Versus Personally Identifiable Searches article explains this issue more, and it's something Google used successfully to argue against handing over query data to the US Department Of Justice. Given this, it needed to put some protections into place. That mechanism is to only show data about queries that happen often.

"Something has to be in the hundreds of times per week for you to see trends," said Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search products & user experience, about the service. This is also touched on in the help page on the Google Trends site.

Some things to keep in mind. For example, Mayer cited to me a yankees,red socks comparison. Searches for Yankees are well above the Red Socks, so they must be more popular! Well, it's also a case that there are more people in New York than Boston, so there are more people potentially searching for the Yankees.

(Postscript: So I'm an idiot -- it's Red Sox, of course. And yankees,red sox for 2006 shows Red Sox actually much closer to Yankees. So cop-out time, the point in general remains valid. There are things that can skew the stats in ways you might not expect. For example, if you search for a particular company and you see growth in their name, are they more popular? In 2005, you might think so for Kryptonite. But go broader, you'll see a spike in 2004 associated with the Kryptonite locks-can-be-picked-by-ballpoint-pin-fiasco. That incident might have helped fuel some of the rise in following year -- searches that aren't necessarily reflecting a popular view of the company).

Another caveat. The geographic data is based on IP targeting, which isn't perfect. In particular, people who use AOL are often seen as if they are in Virginia, regardless of their true location.

How about query spam? Google's got a system designed to help filter for this, either if intentionally done or accidentally. For example, if it sees many queries all coming from the same IP address, that might be caught. Similarly, if it sees many queries coming from different cookies, it could be caused by the same person who rejects standing cookies. Each search would generate a new cookie, so potentially the same single person might be seen as different individuals.

"We are savvy to that case and make sure we saw queries from 100 different unique cookies that aren't fresh," she said.

Also, the data isn't filtered or consolidated in the way things happen in Google Zeitgeist or other search data mining tools. In other words, car brings back different results than cars. And if you want to see the dark underbelly of search, you can see in sex,ipod that if Apple sold a sexPod, it would leave iPod in the dust. You can also search for explicit adult terms, should you have the hankering.

Finally, Google rightly warns that this is more a play thing that something you can use for definitive predictions of popularity.

For a different spin on Google Trends, check out Barry's post, Fun With Google Trends. Now that we've warned you not to take the data too seriously, time for some comparisons anyway :)

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 3:26 PM | Permalink

April 3, 2006

Just How Accurate Is The Google Zeitgeist?

Accuracy of Google Zeitgeist over at our Search Engine Watch Forums is a nice "what gives" about some oddities in the international version of the Google Zeitgeist, where it gives you a rundown on search behavior in various countries. For instance, why is viagra so hot in Singapore -- and why do links from the Zeitgeist actually bring up Google South Africa?

It got me to give the lists for each country a second look, and I was scratching my head as well. For example, "national lottery" is the top popular query for the United Kingdom in Feburary 2006? Really? Somehow, I doubt it.

Let's spin back to the Google Zeitgeist in general. I don't think Google's ever released a complete "top searches" list on it. Instead, they focus "rising" terms or popular terms in various categories, such as this:

Zeitgeist This Week Gaining Search Queries: Week Ending March 27, 2006

1. debra lafave 2. scarlett johansson 3. danica patrick 4. chicken little 5. paul dana 6. buck owens 7. daylight savings time 8. george mason 9. shakira 10. rocio durcal 11. stay alive 12. inside man 13. super adventure club 14. sasha cohen 15. tiger woods

These aren't the most popular queries. These are queries that are said to be gaining the most growth. However, Google filters out things like navigational terms or sexual terms, so there could be some gainers we aren't seeing.

On a monthly basis, you can get what look like top terms in various categories. You can see some examples here, then the monthly archives stop, from November 2005 through January 2006. The current page here here has Feburary 2006.

Those top searches feel OK. I can see something like "iran" as the most searched for country or "xbox 360" as the most searched for video game. But now let's go to the international list.

Why does Singapore have "viagra" at the top of the list? First, maybe it isn't. "Popular" queries don't necessarily mean most popular for each country. Second, other counties might have plenty of viagra searches, as well. But Google might be filtering these out of the top query lists and failed to do that for Singapore.

Similarly, why is "national lottery" seeming to be the most popular query in the UK? Chances are, it's not. Again, popular does not equal most popular. I'm sure any country with a national lottery gets a large number of similar queries, a navigational request of people trying to see what the winning numbers are. It might be these are being filtered out of other lists but not the UK's.

Anyway, I'll drop a note to Google to see if I can get a little clarity on some of this.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:59 PM | Permalink

February 21, 2006

Current TV Launched Google Current

Dirson reports that Current TV has recently launched Google Current. Google Current will be a broadcast of the most recent and popular Google News stories every 30 minutes. Gary blogged about this back in August 2005 but it wasn't viewable until recently, I guess.

Postscript: Philipp has notified me that this is not a new launch. The difference is that Current TV was available on Google Video, but now is also available at www.current.tv/google.

Posted by Barry Schwartz at 10:51 AM | Permalink

January 12, 2006

Google Zeitgeist Receives Makeover, New Weekly Edition

A member of the SEW Forums points out that the Google Zeitgeist home page has a new look and features a new weekly edition. If you're interested in comparing, here's the Zeigeist page from April 2005.

Posted by Gary Price at 2:36 PM | Permalink

December 22, 2005

Your Own Personal Google Zeitgeist

Setting trends on the Official Google Blog covers a great holiday gift, a way to see your own top searches on Google. Very, very cool. You need Google Personalized Search active. Got it? Good, now go to your trends page. There you'll see the top 10 searches you've done, the top 10 sites you've visited and the top 10 things you've most clicked on.

The time period isn't given, and I'm gong to follow up to find out more the difference between sites visited and top clicks, since they feel very similar. You also get nice charts of monthly, daily and hourly search activity -- though what time zone that hourly activity shows isn't said. I'm guessing Pacific. If so, nice if you could adjust this to your own time zone in the future.

By the way, click on any of the bar charts, and you'll see details of the particular time period you've selected, in terms of top queries and top sites.

Finally, you're shown the top five things other people searched for that are similar to your searches. That's less than impressive, at least for me. Check out my list:

None of these seem remotely to anything I've searched for, I'm afraid, especially number two.

Postscript: I sent across these follow-up questions to Google, and here they are, with responses:

1) What period covers the top tens? These my top ten searches today, this week, last 30 days?

Those are top 10 of "all time" (since you started using Personalized Search).

2) Monthly, if I click on a bar, is that the last month? Daily, the last particular day in a given week or all days (ie all Wednesdays) over a period of time. Same thing on hourly.

If you click on a month, those are the top queries/sites for that month. If you click on a day (e.g., Wednesday), those are the top queries/sites for all Wednesdays. Same thing for hourly: that's the total across all days' searches during that hour.

On hourly, what time zone. This all in Pacific? If so, plans to allow changing to your own time zone coming?

It uses the user's local time zone (or to be more specific, the time zone of the user's computer). In fact, all of a user's search history is in their local time zone.

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 12:26 PM | Permalink

December 20, 2005

Google Releases 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist

The 2005 Year-End Google Zeitgeist with popular search terms and trends was released today. In the past week, we've heard from most of the large web engines with their year-end lists.

Google's year-end package offers numerous rankings in a variety of categories including: + World Affairs + Nature + Movies + Celebrities + Phenomena

Most categories don't show simple Top 5 or Top 10 lists like we found on other lists. Instead, you'll see charts that allow you to see how certain terms did over certain periods of time and tied to specific events. For example, in the Celebrities section you'll see how Britney, Mariah, and Shakira did over the year and tied to events in their lives. Fun!

Of course, Google does offer a few tradtional lists including: Google.com - Top Gainers of 2005 1. Myspace 2. Ares 3. Baidu 4. wikipedia 5. orkut 6. iTunes 7. Sky News 8. World of Warcraft 9. Green Day 10. Leonardo da Vinci Google News - Top Searches in 2005 1. Janet Jackson 2. Hurricane Katrina 3. tsunami 4. xbox 360 5. Brad Pitt 6. Michael Jackson 7. American Idol 8. Britney Spears 9. Angelina Jolie 10. Harry Potter

Froogle - Top Searches in 2005 1. ipod 2. digital camera 3. mp3 player 4. ipod mini 5. psp 6. laptop 7. xbox 8. ipod shuffle 9. computer desk 10. ipod nano

Year-end Zeitgeist's back to 2001 can be found by clicking on the desired year under the "Yearly Archives" header on the right side of this page.

My post from last Friday that discussed the Dogpile year-end list also includes direct links to the year-end rankings we posted last week from Lycos, Yahoo, AOL and A9.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:21 PM | Permalink

September 28, 2005

Better Yahoo Tools Coming To Measure Search Buzz - And Watch Google, Too!

Yahoo! Testing New Branding Metrics for Search at ClickZ covers how Yahoo is helping more advertisers tap into tools to measure brand reach and buzz through search, a sign that tracking search buzz is finally getting some needed, renewed attention.

Many are familiar with Yahoo Buzz, the consumer-facing service that shows what's hot in search. Not so well known is another version that advertisers and others can tap into. Yahoo has had that product for years. It's not new, as the story suggests. Instead, it sounds like it's being given a revamp in preparation for wider positioning. A new "Search Share Of Voice" tool is also planned.

It's long overdue for greater outreach like this. As we've had more and more "word-of-mouth" tools designed to measure blog buzz, it's seemed forgotten that search engines have access to much more broad web buzz based on what wide, everyday audiences are looking for and writing about.

FYI, Google's got a similar tools it developed to help CurrentTV do Google Zeitgeist segments. I asked Google a couple of weeks ago whether these tools might be rolled out for others to use, when talking about them. It's something Google has in mind, but there were no immediate plans to do so. So we watch and see!

Posted by Danny Sullivan at 8:25 AM | Permalink

July 14, 2005

An RSS Feed for Google Zeitgeist is Now Available

Since Google doesn't offer an "official" RSS (or ATOM) feed for their Google Zeitgeist rankings of popular search terms, Kunal Anand decided to create one using a "screen scraper" he built with Perl code. Here's a link to the GZeitgeist feed along with some technical details posted on Kunal's blog. On Searchblog, JB wonders if the feed will be around for long since it's a screen scrape.

On a related note, the Yahoo Buzz Index of popular search terms offers a number of "official" RSS feeds.

Posted by Gary Price at 5:37 PM | Permalink

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