Top online search terms of 2004
Tue, Jan 18 2005
In any type of business it's critical to analyse market trends to see what your customers are interested in and where the market is likely to go in the future. Traditional businesses often obtain this sort of information by running surveys, analysing sales data or buying industry statistics from brokers.
Running an online business has a huge advantage over a traditional business because much of this sort of information is available to you for the asking: your website traffic report is a critical tool for understanding exactly what your customers are doing on your website, giving you a great deal of insight into which parts people find useful and which aren't being visited.
But your traffic report is only for your website: imagine if you could gain access to information about not just your own customers but also what web users all around the world are doing.
Search engines are the first point of contact for the vast majority of web users when they go online to research a particular topic or look for a certain product. They are like the 'gatekeepers' of the Internet, making them an ideal point at which to study user behaviour.
Like normal websites, most search engines store data about searches conducted by users. As a result search engine operators have access to an absolute wealth of information about user habits. They know what the top search was among French users last week, how many people look for pizza delivery services on Friday compared to Tuesday, and whether Britney Spears really is more popular than Paris Hilton.
Wouldn't it be nice if search engine operators made some of their results available to us?
Luckily, they do - you just have to know where to look. Both Google and Yahoo! provide various reports about top searches and trends factored against demographic and geospatial data to provide a fascinating insight into the collective mind of web users.
To see a report on the top Yahoo! searches focusing on spikes (topical search queries) with demographic information, go to buzz.yahoo.com.
Yahoo! have also published a report on the top searches of 2004, including fascinating timelines putting several searches up against each other across the year to see how they were affected by major events. For example, you can compare search trends for Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings and associate search frequency with film launch dates at tools.search.yahoo.com/top2004/
Overture is a company that provides targeted advertising based on search terms, so as you can imagine they've got lots of stats that are directly relevant to business. They provide a very nifty little tool that lets you check how many times a term was searched for last month, and also reports associated terms. For example, try entering "ipod" to see how many times it was searched and a list of related search terms using the tool at inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/
And of course Google have a wealth of information as well, which they make available in summary form as the Google Zeitgeist report.
Spending a bit of time going through those reports is fascinating for anyone who sells products online. I highly recommend that you check out the search data available free online since it gives you a good overview of what people are doing with the Internet in general. Your own personal site traffic report is critical for understanding what your users are doing but it's a limited view: like looking at the world through a keyhole. Search engine reports help you get the big picture and put everything in context.