Google Trends: Free Keyword Popularity & Trend Tool

An other product Google released is named Google Trends, which is much easier to understand than Google Co-op. It basically shows you Web search and news search volume over time, broken down by region, city and language. I did a pretty large write up of it at SEW Blog named Fun With Google Trends and Danny has a great break down of what it really is also.

I would like to offer one more example, here, as a bit of payback for Danny's comment on the SearchCast about the Australians Fond Of Google; Vegemite Getting Jealous. In short, I had no idea what Vegemite was, supposedly it is a "dark brown, salty food paste made from yeast extract" to spread on bread or something. Danny said it is like Skippy in the US. So I thought it would be particularly interesting to see Google Trends compare the two, specifically using languages and regions.

Google Trends result for Skippy, Vegemite:

Skippy is in blue and Vegemite is in red:

As you can see from the chart, Skippy is way more popular. :)

But let's break it down by region and we will see that in Australia, Vegemite is way more popular, way more. In New Zealand, Vegemite is also more popular then Skippy, but not by much. But Skippy wins in all the other countries.

How about language? Well, Skippy wins for popularity in that break down. Australians speak English, so you see how popular Vegemite is in Australia just by how close Vegemite comes to Skippy.

Pretty cool tool? But there are many other uses for this tool. You can use it to predict trends, plan your SEM PPC spend and much much more. Is it the say all and end all tool? Definitely not, we are not even sure what data is being used exactly for this. So use with caution.

Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums and WebmasterWorld.

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posted rustybrick in Other Google Topics at May 11, 2006 7:58 AM Comments (7)

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Great tool. A lot like Yahoo Buzz.

Tried searching on "search engine marketing"

Looks like there maybe some outsourcing of our industry? :)

http://google.com/trends?q=search+engine+marketing&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

Posted by Jonathan Mendez at May 11, 2006 09:44

India almost the #1 reigion for everything..

Posted by Gabs at May 11, 2006 11:44

Google Trends is turning out to be a really cool and fun tool to use. I like it.

The new Google products that were launched are receiving a lot of coverage. I actually came across a really good article at Technology Review talking about it.

Here: http://www.technologyreview.com/read_article.aspx?ch=infotech&sc=&id=16828&pg=1

Posted by DIGSox at May 11, 2006 13:58

*laughs*
and, just so you know, there are alternate meanings of 'skippy' - the Australian searches for it are likely to be about an old children's show about a kangaroo (no, really).
Never heard of a spread by that name, down here :)

Posted by Lea de Groot at May 11, 2006 17:20

If they would only add Numbers on the left Column - to get an approximate idea of the amount of searches

BTW:

Look at these SURPRISING results for the queries
PAGERANK.... PAGE RANK...

google.com/trends?q=pagerank%2C+page+rank&ctab=0&date=all&geo=all

Posted by Search Engines WEB at May 11, 2006 18:36

Related to what was mentioned above ("Skippy" being the name of an old kids show), you have to be careful when comparing search terms.
i.e. "Skippy" is also a character on the old popular sit-com "Family Ties" (w. Michael J Fox)...

So that's 3 potential variations of Skippy, including the peanut butter, whereas I'd bet "vegemite" has only the one.

I did a trend search for:
Vegemite, skippy peanut butter
and came up with a chart that shows Vegemite is actually MORE searched for - although I'm not entirely sure if it's really accurate (there's a spike at the beginning of the chart for Skippy that slowly declines - dunno why that'd be).

http://google.com/trends?q=Vegemite%2C+skippy+peanut+butter

So imo it's a great toy and potentially valuable tool, but gotta be careful what we enter and take the results with a grain of salt...

Posted by Steve Gill at May 15, 2006 10:39

Wow thanks didn't know it was there ;) !

Posted by Joost at June 7, 2007 13:55

Google Trends: Free Keyword Popularity & Trend Tool

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