A new tool for advertisers, merchandisers and common users

Aug 6, 2008 09:11 GMT  ·  By
Google launches a new tool that offers insights into global and local search behavior
   Google launches a new tool that offers insights into global and local search behavior

Do you want to know which was the most popular travel-related query in the last 30 days or over the last year in your country? Some would say that Google Trends fits this job just perfectly. However, it was the giant itself that considered differently, and launched another tool to come to the aid of advertisers, merchandisers and common users who are interested in the search patterns from a specific region and during a defined time range.

Google Insights for Search is a tool that was launched yesterday. It offers diagrams and charts with the distribution of fields and specific words in the queries of people from different regions. A global report is also available on demand. Basically, the tool consists of a chart that follows the search trends during the selected time range. Also, some of the most representative news stories written on that subject are highlighted on the chart and are displayed in right corner of the page.

Besides the display of trends over a time scale, users are also shown the distribution of interest in a selected area. If someone is looking for a global report, for instance, the tool will provide for them a top of the countries where a particular subject was considered most interesting. Also, users are offered a chart with ascending searches, which shows the growth rate of related search terms in the chosen time range.

If the search is related to a term that also has a secondary meaning, selecting a filtering category from Arts, Computers, Food & Drink, Real Estate, Science and many others, enables users to receive the most accurate results to their queries. Google normalizes the data before offering a view of the regional interest in a particular matter.

This means that some variables are excluded from the analyzed data, on the premise that a country with a small number of inhabitants would never have the chance to appear in a global ranking. Google disregards the number of inhabitants of a country, focusing exclusively on the percentage of people who search for something. For example, a country with 1 million residents will occupy a better position than the U.S. in a "watermelon" search ranking, on the condition that 90% of the 1 million people include the name of this fruit in their queries.