A new layer to Google Trends

Friday, June 20, 2008

Two years ago,
we launched
Google Trends, a tool that lets
anyone see what the world is searching for, and compare the world’s interest in your favorite
topics.
Last year,
we added
Hot Trends, which
shows what people are searching for right now—the fastest rising search queries on Google,
updated every hour. And just
last week,
we introduced normalized search volume numbers available for export in Google Trends.

Today, we add a new layer to Trends with
Google Trends for Websites,
a fun tool that gives you a view of how popular your favorite websites are, including your own!
It also compares and ranks site visitation across geographies, and related websites and searches.

Let’s take a look at one example, the release of Radiohead’s
In Rainbows
album. As part of our annual
Zeitgeist,
we post the fastest rising search terms, and this past year,
radiohead
took the crown as the fastest rising search term in the last quarter of 2007.

Using Google Trends, we can see the search volume for
radiohead compared to in rainbows over the last 12 months.

With Hot Trends, we can see that on
October 10th
(the release date of In Rainbows), people were most interested
in
downloading
In Rainbows and
reviews
of the new release.

Now, using Trends for Websites, this story can be viewed from another perspective: we can see how
the number of unique visitors that visit radiohead.com and
inrainbows.com has changed over the last 12 months, the
countries where the sites are most popular, the top related sites and search terms.

We can see that in October 2007,
radiohead.com (the blue line) saw a huge surge in popularity.
The release of In Rainbows clearly drove many people to visit
the band’s website. The album’s website, inrainbows.com
(the red line), saw an even more dramatic jump; probably because that is where you could actually
download the new album. And, it looks like site traffic to
radiohead.com has increased overall, even as
inrainbows.com traffic declined.

Keep in mind that Trends for Websites is a
Google Labs
product and that we are experimenting with ways to improve the quality of the data. Because data
is estimated and aggregated over a variety of sources, it may not match the other data sources
you rely on for web traffic information. For more information, be sure to check out our
Website Owners FAQs.

To start using Trends for Websites, head over to
Google Trends.

Written by R.J. Pittman, Director of Product Management – Consumer Search Properties