Following on from a previous post about the way Google is responding to social networking, Google has included hot topics and hot searches as part of its trends service at: http://google.co.uk/trends , although only hot topics is available at the moment in the UK.
Trends
If you’re not familiar with Google trends, its a powerful tool that gives a graphical rep of most popular search topics and terms over a 5 year period. So if you wanted to compare market growth for example between companies, brands etc you can quickly generate a 5 year graph based on their related search terms. OK, as a data mining tool it could be argued that using Google’s search entries might return flakey results but it cannot be ignored mainly because of the sheer volume of the empirical data that has been indexed. Add in the ability to quickly analyse by region, sector and be be able to include Boolean searches for up to 5 terms then this becomes very powerful market research tool. (There is also Google Insights for more in-depth analysis.) If its used in conjuction with Google’s keyword tool to identify exactlywhich terms are being typed in the most its not difficult to envisage the benefits for online businesses. The issue is how this information will influence what we do and how quickly we can respond.
Now add into this mix Hot topics and Hot searches. The emphasis here is identifying the fastest growing trends (rather than the volume of searches overall) However the main difference is in the speed of search data being compiled- hot topics/hot searches results are compiled daily and hourly respectively whereas a standard Google search compiles results over a longer period. So essentially Google trends is showing what people are looking for now (i.e., sudden peaks in interest) . (The difference between hot topics and hot searches – the former focuses on the news orientated trends whilst the latter algorithm reflects actual searches)
Google’s HOT Topics and Hot Searches
As mentioned in a previous post this is a response by Google to the immediacy of social networking ,while keeping the distinction with overall longer term search trends. Hot topics trawls the social networks etc looking for the ‘most buzz’ i.e. keywords and phrases that are on the ‘up’ in terms of popularity. Its probably best to think about these like the pop charts – for example no 1 in the top 10 Hot topics is ‘haiti telethon’ which reflects what is a happening now. How does this work? very crudely the data is ‘normalised’ so that figures are not actual search numbers but compared against an average of current searches (a bit like stand dev). So if there is a sudden peak in interest the height of the peak moves the topic up the charts
Hot searches by contrast reference the number of Google searches for those topics. Both of these indexing services operate over a very short time frame (hours rather rather than the ussual weeks or months) making them a very rich data mining resource for businesses. E.g., e-commerce sites could make use of the latest Hot topics and searches for latest fashion trends, music music realtime (well, almost) .
If you try and keep ahead of the game its probably having a play with some of the advanced tools also. While they are kept as a separate service from Google’s main web searching tools it will be interesting to see if they remain that way as other services have now crept into the listings on to the main search page (shopping, news etc)
What are the opposition doing? Well Yahoo is calling it ‘Buzz’ and Bing has created what appears to be clone – its actually a ‘mashup’ pulling its data from Google trends and spits out its top results using its own algorithm. Inevitably results differ considerably as you would expect, although Google as the NO 1 search engine continues to be the trail blazer.
Remember to log in to your Google account to get the most out of Google’s tools. Go have a look and play at:
Today we celebrate both the birth of this great Human Rights activist and the impact his legacy has had, not just in the US but the world over. Yet it has has taken over 40 years for this sea change in social and political attititudes to come about.