Insights into Search

Posted by Lima Al-Azzeh Feb 9, 2009

In a recent meeting with search expert Marc Bitanga, I learned of a unique tool called Google Insights. The beta version of Insights was released on August 5th of 2008 and is aimed at analyzing keyword trends.

There are two specific purposes behind this new tool in the Google family. The first purpose is to analyze trends in the seasonality of a search term, which is roughly how long a search term redeems high results, and the geographic distribution of the term, which is where in the world that term redeems the highest results.

A good example of how this tool works is to track the volume of search on a seasonal topic. A search for 2010 Olympics showed that interest in this topic started to rise in 2006. Incidentally, this is the year that Vancouver’s Mayor, Sam Sullivan, was passed the Olympic flag at the end of the Winter Olympics in Torino, Italy. Meanwhile search for this topic drops but picks up in 2008 as the Olympic games get closer. It will be interesting to see the volume of search for this term come 2010 and beyond.

Finding out the geographic distribution of a term also rendered interesting results. Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore and Canada yielded the highest results for the word “neighbourhood” spelled in British English. Yet when spelled as “neighborhood” the search yielded highest results in the United States. These results show that high search volume can be affected by as simple a detail as regional spelling; an insight that more online writers and search marketers need to take into account when researching keywords.

What Google has created here is a sophisticated tool that reveals that the nature of a successful search isn’t just reliant on what keywords are used, but when and where those terms are used.