Mary Ellen Bates is a superb librarian, and Bates Info Tip has transferred her skills of classifying information to the internet. I received this from her and am using the tools provided by Google below.
Google has been doing some interesting things with its analyses of what people are while they are on the web. Google Trends, which was rolled out in 2006, lets you see how frequently words or phrases were search for in Google, over time. You can even compare the relative frequency of two different words or phrases. I was curious about how people referred to the H1N1 flu, and when the shift occurred from calling it “swine flu”. I typed in the two phrases, swine flu and H1N1, separated by a comma. [“swine flu”, h1n1] According to the search results, it wasn’t until October that most people shifted over to referring to the flu strain as H1N1. I can also see search trends in specific countries and in specific cities and states or provinces.
Google’s latest analysis tool is Google Trends for Websites. You provide one or more URLs; for each web site, Google displays the number of daily unique visitors, the countries or states/provinces they came from, other web sites that they have also visited, and terms they have also searched for. Just as Google Domestic Trends went beyond search queries to compare financial trends to its information, Google Trends for Websites extends its reach and analyzes information on web traffic from a number of outside sources.
Google Trends for Websites only works for fairly high-traffic sites, but can be a useful tool for seeing the relative popularity of web sites, and for getting ideas on alternative search queries on a topic.
Companies can use this as a quick way to see how their web traffic compares to those of its competitors, as well as to see what search words were being used to find them. See, for example, the difference in traffic by geographic location and over time for NBC, CBS and ABC.
Use this tool well to help you increase your keywords to direct traffic to you web site. Also good information to use to see what your competition is doing.
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