Google Launches Trends

An anonymous reader writes "Google started to offer a new Trends service that allows viewing search term request statistics split up by geographical locations and languages. In short one can use Google trends to figure out what's hot and what's not and perhaps even find cyclic patterns to pick best time to advertise. From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)."

Comments

general declining bias?

[dmoen]

From my poking around Google trends I have noticed that there appears to be a general declining bias for most search terms that either has to do with the declining popularity of Google (i.e. less folks were using Google for the past two years) or with the declining amount of searches in general (which is highly unlikely)."

I ran my own tests, and I think that the "search volume" axis is relative to the total number of searches on each day, rather than an absolute number. Most of my tests didn't show a declining bias, although I saw that in a few cases. I think the "declining bias" you saw might be caused by an increase in the diversity of search terms. Old search terms never go away, but new search terms are constantly being created as new names and catch phrases enter popular culture.

Doug Moen

Re:general declining bias?

[All Your Name Are Be]

Exactly. from the About Google Trends page (the first question, no less):

1. How does Google Trends work?

Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results -- our search-volume graph -- plotted on a linear scale.

All this means is that people are using a wider range of search terms. (either from new terms entering general culture or perhaps people are just searching for more than they used to.)

Re:Dumb Pagerank spam.

[Cinnimod]

I'm going to have to agree with WMF above, the examples that the journalist provided in that article are not general search terms for target audiences. He also didn't provide statistics. The reader has no way of knowing whether the journalist put in 10 search terms of his choosing and all ten showed a decline, or whether he sat there for days and put in a thousand different search terms (which I highly doubt).

For example, in a search for trends on searches for "porn", the trend is UP. Searches for "video games" have held pretty steady since 2004. I think he may not have been using general search terms. Maybe he just doesn't want to believe his wonderful trance music could possibly be on the decline. ;P

CowboyNeal's been hoaxed by a marketer

[E-Sabbath]

Indeed, this isn't a new feature, and it certainly looks like someone has an agenda here. Where are people going, if not to google? And the expected trend of any specific query is to decrease over time as popularity wanes.

One Solid Trend

[xoip]

There is no escaping this one...http://www.google.com/trends?q=porn&ctab=0&g eo=all&date=all

Old news

[nascarguy27]

According to this Press Release, Google released Trends on May 10, 2006 along with Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook. It appears that the guy who wrote the article just happened to come across Google Trends, put his own website words into it, and IMO he doesn't understand how it works.