Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

A lot of people are taking the AOL search data and putting research tools online. I downloaded the data and had one of my guys putting it into a database so we could analyze it, but then I realized that there are a lot of these tools popping up that we can use.

Here are a few tools I've seen for analyzing the data in one way or another:
http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/suggest.php
http://www.askthebrain.com/aol/
http://www.dontdelete.com/
http://data.aolsearchlogs.com
http://www.aolsearchdatabase.com/
http://czern.homeip.net/aolsearch/index2.php
http://aoldb.unwieldy.net/index.html

And I'm sure many more to follow...

One thing I find interesting is to see how many sites searchers click on during the research/shopping phase. I haven't seen or calculated the exact number or average sites per search, but a lot of those searchers clicked on several sites for the same keyword search. Obviously it happens, but here we have a good chunck of actual searches broken out by user so we can see how people search.

One finding that's being discussed on EarnersForum.com points out the huge difference in clicks on the first listing compared to the second (and all others below that). Also interesting was that the 10th spot proved to be clicked on more than the 9th spot (as I had suspected was the case), but not a very big difference. I think some people assume the 10th spot gets a ton more clicks than the 9th.

Total Searches:9,038,794
Total Clicks: 4,926,623

Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100
Click Rank3: 418,643
Click Rank4: 298,532
Click Rank5: 242,169
Click Rank6: 199,541
Click Rank7: 168,080
Click Rank8: 148,489
Click Rank9: 140,356
Click Rank10: 147,551

Very interesing stuff, indeed.

P.S. You can still get the data if you want to try sifting through it. The online tools are handy, but if you want to do any serious analysis of the data, you've got to do it yourself, anyway.