Yahoo Clues Gives an Inside and Detailed Look at Popular Searches

Yahoo introduced an interesting new tool for search dubbed Yahoo Clues. While the company hasn't been focusing on search very much lately, the tool can be compared to Google Trends and especially to Google Insights for Search. Yahoo Clues enables you to see how popular are certain queries and even compare two search terms.

"Yahoo! Clues is a new beta service that gives you a unique 'behind the scenes' look into popular trends across the millions of people who use Yahoo! to search each day," Yahoo announced.

"With Yahoo! Clues, you can discover and compare trending information for search terms of interest to you, or explore popular trending search terms on Yahoo!," it added.

Yahoo Clues comes with a lot of data. Search traffic is displayed at top along with trends from a longer period of time, up to 30 days. The searches are then divided by demographic, according to age and gender.

Income data is also provided for the search terms and, finally the popularity of the search terms in the various regions of the US.

While the tool is not exactly great for research, it does provide an interesting insight. And the data you can get is actually quite detailed, for a free tool.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about Yahoo Clues is that it shows past and future searches to the actual keyword, showing the path users take when doing a search.

Because this relies on what most people searched, the search trails are almost always for related items.

For example, preceding a search for "facebook," are queries like "facebook login," "facebook sign up" or "facebook famville." What's interesting is that, while misspelled queries like "facebok" are to be expected before the correct version, a lot of people first searched for "facebook" and then for "facebok" or "face book."

With Google, the preceding searches tend to be misspellings of the word like, "gogle," "googl," or "googel."