RSS feedNew toys from Google
One pretty and trivial, the other complex and far more potent.
Google Trends: www.google.com/trends
Trends is a logical extension from Zeitgeist, allowing you to compare term search volume. Google News events are matched to spikes (at least, that’s the theory) and everyone goes home happy.
It’s fun, and it has some SEO / e-marketing implications which could be quite useful: helping you to choose cost-per-clicks, seeing visually whether a particular campaign has been effective, and so on. To be honest though, I think I’ll mainly use it to track cool patterns like this:
As Hugh would say, rock on.
Google Co-op: www.google.com/coop
In which Google puts its foot into social search in a pretty convoluted way. No screenshots because, in its present form, it’s so abstract and techie that it’s next to useless for the majority of the searching world. Still, it’s still only in beta and we know how good Google’s user interface work can be, so I fully expect this to grow into something very important.
“Help other users find information more easily by creating ’subscribed links’ for your services and labelling webpages around the topics you know best.”
This doesn’t sound particularly new, but there’s a subtle distinction at play here. We’ve become accustomed to two sides of the coin: automated search (Google, Yahoo) and social bookmarking (del.icio.us, digg). As far as I know, this is the first step a major search company has made in bringing the two together. Great potential, but there are a few questions they’ll need to answer:
- How to reduce the impact of spammers? We know from meta keywords that including author-based tags in search results isn’t always wise.
- How can it be smoothly integrated with basic search alongside PageRank etc?
- Most importantly, how will they convince the average user that social search isn’t just biased human meddling?
Categories: google, search, trends, social
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