Analyzing Search Trends: Google Trends and Alternatives

I maintain several “popular links” blogs that basically get traffic from searches of popular topics. If you can optimize your site correctly, meaning you can put your ads in the right places, a well-written article on a current topic can deliver some nice revenue.

I can’t remember what site it was, but there once was a site that would let you watch what people were typing into a search engine in real time. I used to enjoy studying this site for ideas to write articles. I can’t find that site anymore, so I’ve moved on.

Google Trends does a good job of showing you what the most popular searches are for the day, as well as the trending pattern of any search term that passes through Google, given it has had enough searches (search terms with minimal popularity don’t show up in Google Trends). While what google Trends delivers is wonderful, it’s not really perfect for my traffic strategy. The top 20 most popular searches aren’t likely to score me much traffic because there’s simply too much competition. I like to find popular searches that aren’t too popular so I have a chance at a piece of the traffic pie, if that makes sense. This means I needed to find some new resources for finding popular search terms.

Google Insights for search gives you the opportunity to compare search volume patterns across specific regions, categories, time frames and properties. It’s much like Google Trends, but with a lot more filters.

Yahoo! Buzz (buzzlong) is like Google Trends on steroids. Not only do you get a list of the most popular searches, you also get statistical details showing you how dominant a search they are on the day as well as a list of the top “movers” which may not be the most popular search term entered but have seen a drastic climb in popularity. What I like to keep in mind with this took is that Yahoo! gets are less searches than Google and Yahoo! surfers tend to be much less computer and internet savvy than Google users. I say Yahoo! users are less savvy because out of all the computers I’ve has to clean up, it’s always a task that includes multiple yahoo! toolbars installed on these clients’ browsers. These clients are usually computer novices who use yahoo for almost everything.

Surchur is my new favorite for finding out what is gaining interest on the internet. Surchur is like the popurls.com of the search term world. This site elegantly displays the hottest searches from all the popular search engines and social networks.