Trend Watching

We think it is a good point to make a comment about this blog and some things we've noticed. Trend Watching has been up now for a few months, and over that time, we've seen some interesting data with search trends.

For instance, it's fun to watch a specific tool, like Google Trends late at night. You can often see who the guests are on late night talk shows, The Daily Show, and the Colbert Report just by seeing searches on their names hit the hourly Top 100. Odd references on those shows also push searchers toward unusual or under-represented searchs, such as odd phrases or terms.

Woot.com also pushes search traffic. Every time a new w00t is online for purchase, you'll soon see loads of folks looking for that item, or some variation of the product name and 'review' or 'price' as w00ters try to see if they can get a good deal on a tech gadget.

We see lots of recalls, tragedies, famous crimes and criminals, and local news items shoot up search lists. Hometown searchers can quickly be oversampled during a missing person event, or during a shooting or fire.

You can also bet that any time a celebrity scandal or nude celebrity meme breaks, a dozen flavors of that search hit the lists. Everyone loves dirt on their favorite loved/hated culture icons.

We even see financial terms pop up, as company A buys out company B, or the Fed is giving a speech that impacts the traders.

Kids, too, influence search trends as they see ads for Nick or Disney sites. These have a habit of being very cyclical. The have several peaks that push them into top searches, then drop off long enough to be able to peak again a week later.

Domain name searches are frequently driven by commercials and tv references. Freechickenandcoke.com (for example), is a popular search at the moment due to the Chick-Fil-A offer that is being heavily advertised. Why people search on domains rather than type them in is beyond us, but if they have found this site (or a similar one) by doing so, we think it is safe to say that SEO has worked to point the searcher in the right direction. Why would this or any other site show up higher on a search for a specific domain than that domain itself? Test a few that you see on commercials and see how often google, yahoo, ask, and others will rank the domain itself below other sites on such a search. Seems a bit counterintuitive, really, search engines should really default to the domain itself if there is an exact match.

Anyway, we were just bored and felt like finally giving a bit of commentary here on some of these interesting points. We'll expand on this a lot more later as we continue to watch trends, something that has become quite a hobby as meta research into social information flow, dynamic interest peaks, and the evergrowing base of search keywords that defines how and where people get their answers.