Google have launched a new tool, Google Trends. This cool tool tells you how many searches have been done on Google for the terms you enter. The graph format is very nice, but it would be good to have a value on the Y-axis.

Google Trends is really effective for comparing one search term against another, or to see how interest in a person or subject has changed over time. Some good examples:

- People like dogs more than cats in most English-speaking countries, including Ireland, the UK, the US and Australia.
- Ronaldinho has overtaken David Beckham as most talked-about footballer.
- London and Paris are more popular cities than Madrid, Berlin and Rome.
- Heineken is currently the most popular beer, with Budweiser, Carlsberg and Coors trailing.
An excellent feature of the Google Trends tool is that you can drill down to specific countries - and Ireland’s included in the list. So, we can tell that Irish users of Google search for Dublin a lot more than Cork and Galway. But in a marketing sense, we can get some really good information. Some examples:

- “house” has consistently been searched for more than “property”.
- “bmw” is being searched for more than “toyota” - evidence of our current upwardly-mobile nature.
- “blog” is searched for much more than “rss” or “podcast”, showing it’s being accepted more and more by the mainstream.
- Searches for “bulmers” peak in the summer months, the only time of year they number more than searches for “guinness”.
- Searches for the three main broadsheet newspapers in Ireland makes for interesting viewing.

You could spend hours trying different searches on this, and it’s a really good gauge of search habits that can be drilled down to a country level. For popular topics, Google puts markers next to major news events, which is a really good way of seeing how web users react to news stories.
If you’re in marketing, Google Trends is something you need to add to your bookmarks.

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 20th, 2006 at 3:20 pm and is filed under Analytics, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.