SEO Blog

Google’s quest for domination of the World Wide Web took another giant step forward this month. Not satisfied with crushing Yahoo! and steamrollering MapQuest, the techno-geeks at the world’s largest search engine have set their sights on putting newspaper columnists, and just about everyone else in the forecasting business, out of business.

For the last couple of weeks, Google’s online laboratory has been allowing Internet users to test-drive their latest product, Google Trends. Simply enter the key words for the subject matter you are interested in and up pops a chart with the frequency, over time, that that phrase has been searched since 2004. You also see news stories correlated to peak periods and comparisons of the languages, nations and cities within which the search was made.

Where this gets interesting for anyone making a living analyzing or predicting trends is that the results Google displays are the Internet’s raw “inputs” (e.g. search terms), as opposed to “outputs” (the web pages, links, etc.) that are used to generate the results for a typical online query. In other words, Google is serving up the unfiltered interests of millions of its users at any time period — with a few clicks the world is your focus group.

You can idle away many an hour fooling around with Google Trends. The word “sex,” for instance, is most often searched just before New Year’s and most frequently in Pakistan. More people are searching for “God” on the Internet today compared to 2004. Canadians, alas, are the ninth most likely nationality on the planet to enter “lonely” into Google’s search engine.

This technology, still in its in fancy, also provides some tantalizing clues about future trends and could well evolve into a powerful predictive tool.

Take, for example, Stephen Harper’s five priorities. Do these priorities represent a collection of concerns that if tackled by the Tories could win them a majority in the next election?

Well, according to Google Trends, when it comes to what we are searching for on the Internet, the Tories’ five priorities are a 50-50 proposition at best.

The word “crime” has been steadily declining as a search term since 2004, mirroring declining overall crime rates. Searches for “Gomery” and “sponsorship scandal” spiked and crashed in the spring of 2005. People plugging “taxes” into Google peak at income tax time, suggesting there is not a long-term interest.

The two issues that are part of the Tory election platform and show steadily increasing searches on Google are “daycare” and the “Arctic.” We don’t know if the tens of thousands of Canadians who inputted these search terms were in favour of the Tories’ policies, but what Google does tell us is that these are high interest issues in the way that Liberal buzzwords like “Kyoto” and “multiculturalism” are not.

What about the Liberals? Does Google Trends have any clues as to who will win the Liberal leadership? If you run a search on the two front-runners — Michael Ignatieff and Bob Rae — you get a chart that tells you pretty much the same as, and maybe even a bit more than, your average op-ed.

Rae enjoys the longest and most steady duration of searches starting in 2004 and continuing today. But he has had only the smallest online search “bounce” since declaring his candidacy.

Ignatieff, on the other hand, appears out of nowhere in spring 2005 and dominates the search term battle in three big waves, swamping all the other candidates. According to Google Trends, Ignatieff seems to enjoy a clear lead in terms of French and English searches on his bid for the leadership. Will this translate into delegates? Time, and more Googling, will tell.

The whiz kids at Google are onto something very, very big. Imagine a wireless world where every search you make is mapped to your exact location, where our interests, passions and obsessions over time, in mass aggregate form, will be known to everyone else.

Anyone in the “trends” business should start thinking about a new career. I hear Google has a great job site.

Rudyard Griffiths is the executive director of the Dominion Institute. rudyard@dominion.ca