14 DAY TRIAL // People may not be taking Yahoo too seriously when it comes to search, but even without an actual search engine, it still has a lot of people using it and a lot of data flowing through its pipes.
Now, you can check out some of that data and the trends, just in case you wanted to see what someone not using Google would search for, with the revamped Yahoo Clues tool.
"Have you ever wondered how powerful it would be to instantly discover what’s popular to a select group of searchers – by age or gender – over the past day, week or even over the past year?," Yahoo asks.
"Welcome to the new Yahoo! Clues. This free service gives you fun and engaging ways to explore what users are searching for on Yahoo!, offering a 'behind the scenes' look into popular search trends," Yahoo announced.
Yahoo Clues, in the first iteration, showed up in November, but the new version extends its capabilities. A touted new feature is Top Trends which, as the name implies, shows the biggest search trends of the moments.
This is similar to Google Trends which also displays the searches that are seeing the biggest surge in activity at any given time.
However, a possibly more useful way of taking advantage of Clues is with the search comparison tool, which enables you to see how one particular term, or two if you want to compare, has done over time.
This can be restricted to certain demographics and regions since Clues now relies on global data. In the new version you also get a map showing the countries with the most activity related to your term.
There is also more data now, Yahoo Clues goes back a year rather than a month and has tree times more search terms to pick from.