Google’s tool for tracking search term popularity, Google Trends, just got a lot more useful by updating their search term data daily rather than monthly, reports Mashable.
The upgrade to Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends tracker that shows you the 100 most popular search phrases for a given day and even look deeper at individual search phrases.
For example, the third most popular search phrase on September 24, 2007, the eve of the Halo 3 video game release, was "g4tv.com/halo." By clicking on that phrase’s link on the Hot Trends page, you can see the details of the search data for that phrase.
The upgraded Google Trends also includes a Hot Trends gadget to add to your iGoogle start page and an RSS feed for Hot Trends so you can subscribe to them with your RSS reader.
The most useful new feature is the ability to change dates on the Hot Trends so you can view historic data. This feature will give us the ability to track the life cycle of searches and search types as well as to better understand search behavior, particularly event-driven or media-driven search surges.
I’ve noticed, for example, that people search for football-related information on Sundays and Mondays, the days of the games. The last two Sundays have a high proportion of NFL players’ names among the most popular searches.
The September 17, 2007 Monday Night Football game pitted the Philadelphia Eagles against the Washington Redskins. The top searches for that day included "hyperbaric chamber," "andy reid," and "charles barkley."
Andy Reid is the head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles and the Monday Night Football broadcast team discussed his sons’ recent legal problems. The broadcast team also mentioned that one of the football players playing that night used a hyperbaric chamber to help with their game. And finally, former basketball great Charles Barkley was "in the booth" of the Monday Night Football team.
Clearly, viewers were turning to the Web for further information that they heard about on the broadcast.
Google Trends is now an invaluable tool to help Internet marketers and public relations professionals gain insight into how offline media and events affect search behavior.
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