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Google Insights For Search Launches

Barry Schwartz on August 6, 2008 at 12:00 am

Google has launched Google Insights for Search, a tool that helps advertisers and marketers understand searcher behavior. The tool offers a comprehensive set of statistics based on search volume and patters. You can compare seasonal trends, geographic distributions, and category-specific searches, and you can group all these variables together to get extremely specific. In addition, Google allows you see “rising searches” overall or in a specific filter that you have set up.

Overall, this seems to be a huge extension to Google Trends, Google Ad Planner, and the tools available within AdWords to advertisers. I will share some examples with you below, in order to help you understand the powerful set of features Google Insights for Search can offer you.

A neat feature, as I said above, is the ability to see “rising searches.” Rising searches are defined as “searches that have experienced significant growth in a given time period, with respect to the proceeding time period. To see this statistic, you can do a search for any phrase and look at the right bottom area of the page. But what if you wanted to see the top rising searches overall, right now, at Google? All you need to do is clear your search results and the results should come up.

Let’s drill down a bit now. I configured my search to US, New York, in the category of Sports. I see that overall sports-related searches seem to be on the rise, by just looking at the “interest over time” chart:

On the left-hand side, under the chart, you see “Top Searches.” Clearly, [football] is a popular search phrase in New York, but it is baseball season now, so that isn’t too shabby either. On the left-hand side are the “rising searches,” which shows [euro 2008], [ufc], and [sabres] as rising searches.

Since we can, let’s drill down and find out why football is more popular than baseball in Insights. My first instinct was that I need to adjust the time filter to a shorter time period, like 30 days. When doing so, the top searches changes to show me [golf], [mlb], [yankeees], and [mets] — just what I thought. The rising searches include searches such as [brett favre] because of rumors that he might be talking to the NY Jets.

What if I want to know where in New York football is most popular? Clicking on football will break down the chart deeper, showing me Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester, and New York City are all very into their football teams. I can drill down even deeper, but I can imagine you understand this so far.

Let’s do a different type of search, iphone vs blackberry:

This search result has news headlines on the right-hand side of the chart, which plots interest over time. As you can see from the chart, iPhone interest has skyrocketed over blackberry interest in June due to the launch of the iPhone 3G. You can also see that Google Insights breaks down the regional interest, showing a bar chart on the left and a map with search volume on the right. Then the last point of content are the top searches and rising searches, which I explained above. Playing with the “regional interest” drop down menu allows you to compare interests by location of the iphone versus the blackberry. It does see that, historically, Alabama has more interest in the Blackberry over the iPhone. But if you drill deeper you will notice that in June 2007 and 2008, the iPhone interest did surpass the Blackberry interest (at least for those months).

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of possible examples I can give. So why not explore this tool yourself at google.com/insights/search.

About The Author

Barry Schwartz

Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on SEM topics.