Search Trends - Search Engine Marketing

New numbers released for August search engine marketshare from HitWise

SearchEngineLand had a post about Nielsen NetRating's numbers a few days ago. For some reason NetRatings is showing a lot smaller percentage for Google. But they're showing growth in MSN's share of the pie.

HitWise's numbers seem to be more in line with reality based on traffic distribution I'm seeing to clients' sites--at least when it comes to Google's share of the market.

Labels: hitwise, search engine stats, search trends

Since this blog is called Search Trends, and due to the industry I'm in (SEO), I am very interested in what people are searching for. Most of the time, my clients don't care about what the most popular searches are, they just care about the most popular searches for their industry. However, I find it very interesting to see what keywords people are searching for. Many search engines and social media sites offer up data showing the most popular searches.

Rand and friends over at SEOMoz have recently released another cool free tool, the Popular Searches tool that compiles popular search data from several data sources.

I like that this tool pulls from a variety of sources--blog search (technorati), web search (Yahoo, Google, AOL, Ask, Lycos), ecommerce (eBay and Amazon), social media (flickr, delicious). I'd like to see all this data somehow weighted and pooled into a single database that could be sorted and analyzed over specific time periods. It would be interesting to see search trends for specific products, or music bands, genres, etc. But it's definitely easier than going to each of these sites on your own to try to figure out what's hot.

Labels: keywords, popular searches, search trends

Google recently introduced a cool new trend watching tool they call Hot Trends. It ties in with Google Trends, but it shows a list of hot search keywords by date (only goes back to May 15 of this year) and then you can click on the word or phrase to see the trend page for that particular search term. Since Google controls the lion's share of Internet searches, it's nice that they like to share at least some of it with us search engine junkies. It's mostly news and blog search stuff, but very interesting to see what are the hot topics of the day.

Labels: google, google trends, news, search trends