Yahoo Clues: New Fun Search Keyword Tool

Today, Yahoo announced a new tool named Yahoo Clues. Yahoo Clues basically gives you insight into the types of people searching for specific keyword phrases and shows related terms based on those searches and searchers.

The tool allows you to plug in one or two keyword phrases and it then plots the search trends of those keywords on the page. It shows you keyword popularity over time, searches by age and gender, income level, geographic location, “search flow” and related searches.

Let me take you through each metric for a comparison of iphone vs android on Yahoo Clues.

Here you can see the two search trends plotted over time:

Here is a break down by age and gender:

You can then click on a specific age/gender segment to see that women are more about searching for white iPhones while men are more about searching for jailbreaking iPhones.

The same type of detail for income brackets:

You can also see the searches by location:

And then break it down within a state to see cities:

Search Flow is neat, it basically shows you most probable previous and next user searches from an analysis of aggregated search patterns:

Finally, it shows related searches:

Yahoo told us that the tool only searches against the most popular queries you see. For example, a search on [canonical] shows this error:

That indicates that data about searches for “canonical” aren’t available through the tool. Yahoo said they hope to expand the number of terms included over time.

Yahoo also said they update their information every 6-12 hours. Updated: Yahoo sent us clarification on this from the product team, which is reporting that data is updated “approximately hourly.”

For more definitions on these graphs and data points, see this help document or watch the video below:

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.