The novelty of the Google Trends software has been discussed on this blog before, in relation to how it can be used to look at data on search volume and news reference volume.
Recent experimentation with keywords has convinced me that the selection of the keyword is a crucial consideration when trying to analyse search volume. For example, the use of "Bush", "George Bush" and "George Bush Jr" produces very different results. So how can this issue be addressed?
The answer may be to find the most popular keywords related to a core question, and to aggregate these for analysis. I have yet to find an aggregation function for keywords in Google Trends, but I have discovered a website that provides information about the most popular keywords used in web searches. Sitepsych.com is described by Max Sutherland in one of his columns.
A list of the top 200 search terms that people use, week by week or month by month, is available for free from Sitepsych. Sutherland says that: "A casual inspection of the top 200 list over a 90 day period, quickly tells you that the most popular things that people are looking for on the web are sex, music, games, dogs, golf, the weather and map-directions. Sex and music dominate".
It would be interesting to see how the propensity to search for sex and music on the internet can be explained by age, gender, religion and nationality, notwithstanding potential selection bias in internet usage, and how this may change in the future due to government schemes along the lines of "fast track to information technology".
2 comments:
Does this software allow conditional statements? I want to know about people searching for "Britney", "Liam", "Spears" and "Delaney". Key trends like that.
If you want to know about people searching for keywords Kevin, then you can start with getting the IP addresses of people who search for particular phrases on
http://www.aolstalker.com/
This searchable database contains 36389569 searches made by AOL users from 01 March, 2006 - 31 May, 2006. The data was released under a non-commercial research license by AOL. Apparently it is impossible to identify anyone.
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