17 May 2006 | Author: Chris Liversidge

Google Trends, search engine optimisation, and...Jae Seo?

Google Trends has been a hot topic since it was launched last week, and here at the bigmouthmedia labs we thought we'd break down this latest offering to see just what it can, and can't, do.

The Google Trends tool is based on a strange blend of a reduced dataset and advanced, user-friendly functionality. There are a range of features available to the user and search term comparison is emphasised. Using different syntax, you can either compare up to five search queries or you can determine how many queries contained a combination of those search terms. Just as with regular Google searches you can subtract query terms from your results.

Results are plotted into a graph of search frequency plotted over time for each term as in this search:



















In this sample search we can see the relation of the terms 'SEO' in blue, 'Search Engine Optimisation' in red, and 'Search engine Optimization' in yellow. We can see that SEO easily outperforms the other terms for frequency. But the story doesn't end here. Notice the letters at peak points in the results, they indicate a listing of news stories grabbed from Google News at the time of the peak, or spike, in the results. The relevant listings are shown below:




















As we now see, and as a significant percentage of our American readership will already know, SEO is also the surname of Mets pitcher Jae Seo - and the spikes refer to significant events over the past years for Jae and not to SEO as an abbreviation for search engine optimisation.

Comparisons on search terms need, therefore, to be taken with a cautionary note - and, as we shall see, one of the strengths of Google Trends is to identify such variations in meaning and context for search terms.

Our sample search can also been broken down by city, region, or language.

















With India, the Czech republic, Japan and others in the top regions for our search terms where the predominant language is not English, upon which our abbreviation is based, we can safely assume that SEO refers to something quite other than search engine optimisation in those cases. It is a lowly tenth out of ten for the English speaking UK before we get relevant results for our query.

Fortunately Google has thought of this and allows you to select regions for your results, which means you can, individually, generate comparative results for each country. However, functionality for filtering out different languages in the results would be a definite plus were it to be implemented by Google.

Conclusions to be drawn from this test? Well, there are certainly some cool features here, and comparing keyword frequencies has never been so fun, but there is a fundamental problem with Google Trends, which is that there is clearly a very limited dataset from which the results are being produced. Google itself states quite clearly that this is the case, and therefore we can't really complain too much. Personally, I'm happy Google have come up with this well designed, reasonably useful tool which allows you to get a broad feeling for search terms in particular industries, but I'm holding out for full dataset access.

Hey, we can all dream can't we?

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