Search Engine Optimization Help

If you look at Hot Searches in Google Trends for Feb. 7, 2010, “dockers free pants” ranks #1, “dockers.com/freepants” ranks #2, “dockers super bowl ad” ranks #10, and “www.dockers.com/freepants” ranks #14.

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Last week, a post on the Predictably Irrational blog described the differences in what boyfriends and girlfriends were looking for their beloveds to do based on Google Suggest. Google Suggest can provide hours of fun. Just spend some time at Autocomplete Me or QuestionSuggestions. But can it provide useful audience analysis for understanding our customers, [...]

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The Technology Review magazine has an article named How Google Ranks Tweets. They interviewed Amit Singhal, a Google Fellow, who led development of Google’s real-time search, on the topic.
Amit explained that in the social context, the number of people following someone is similar to the number of links pointing to a page. [...]

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Google announced a bunch of new features today. Let’s dive in:

Real-time integration
See the latest tweets, blogs, news etc. You can click on “Latest results” in the search results or the “Latest” link in the Search Options panel in order to get more results for a given keyword/phrase.

Hot Topics on Google Trends

This feature is similar to “trending topics” on Twitter. This is not the same as “Hot Trends” launched in September. That included a Google graph at the bottom of search results if you happened to search one of the top 100 hottest trends in Google search on a given day. This new feature is viewable simply by visiting Google Trends.

Oh yeah, and Google Trends is now out of Labs.

Search by Voice in Japanese

Searching by Voice is available on Google search apps for smartphones. So far, it has understood English and Mandarin. Now, Japanese is added to the mix.

“What’s Nearby?” on Google Maps

Find local businesses near where you are. Available for Google Maps for Android on versions 1.6 or higher. In coming weeks, browsing to google.com on iPhone or Android phone and then clicking “Near me now” will give you the same option.

Google Goggles Launches into Labs for Android

This lets users search by taking pictures of products, works of art, and locations they’re interested in instead of typing in a query. There is a reason this in Labs, as not all things are ready for primetime including animals, plants, cars, etc. You can help the process along by using the new tool.

via Official Google Blog and Google Mobile blog

Okay, so Google Flu Trends has been around since November of 2008. But Google has found that certain search terms are good indicators of flu activity.

Check out the world map below to see how Google Flu Trends uses aggregated Google search data to estimate flu activity. It is intense in Canada and Norway. It is high in Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Sweden, Russia, Ukraine, and the United States.

Each week, millions of users around the world search for health information online. As you might expect, there are more flu-related searches during flu season, more allergy-related searches during allergy season, and more sunburn-related searches during the summer.

You can explore all of these phenomena using Google Insights for Search. But can search query trends provide the basis for an accurate, reliable model of real-world phenomena?

Google has found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for “flu” is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries are added together.

Google compared its query counts with traditional flu surveillance systems and found that many search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often Google sees these search queries, it can estimate how much flu is circulating in different countries and regions around the world. Their results have been published in the journal Nature.

So, according to the world map, now would be a great time to visit Australia, where flu activity is minimal. Throw another shrimp on the barbie.

The good news about companies competing to get information about the flu out to the public is that said public now has abundant resources to stay informed. Microsoft and Google are both promoting their flu sites this week; here’s the lowdown:

Microsoft launched an H1N1 site this week. Check it out at http://www.h1n1responsecenter.com. The site helps people assess their symptoms to see if they meet H1N1 criteria.

“If current estimates are correct, many emergency departments across the nation could be overwhelmed by two groups of patients — those who have H1N1 and those who believe they have H1N1,” said Angela Gardner, M.D., FACEP, president of the American College of Emergency Physicians.

“By providing an at-home tool that can help users evaluate whether they need to see a provider before they head to the hospital, we can encourage those who are severely ill or at risk for serious illness to contact their doctor, and reassure everyone else that it is safe and prudent to recover at home,” Dr. Arthur Kellermann, professor of emergency medicine and an associate dean of the Emory School of Medicine.

Keeping the infected and uninfected separated is crucial to preventing the spread of the H1N1 flu.

“This will reduce the number of people needlessly exposed to H1N1 influenza in crowded clinic and ER waiting rooms, and allow doctors and nurses to focus their attention on those who need them most.”

Meanwhile, Google has expanded their flu trends to include 16 additional countries. The site, which launched last November, is now available in 37 different languages. Google says that it does not use popular terms such as the colloquial “swine flu” because many searchers are simply looking it up due to news headlines. Instead, Google uses CDC data to corroborate flu-related search terms. In countries, such as Mexico, where they do not have historical data, they use seasonality to help determine relevant searches. They’ve also labeled such efforts as “experimental” since they’re based purely on search.

Twitter and real time search continues to attract buzz, and Google’s reacting by positioning its “Hot Trends” information in a place where more people will see it, within Google’s regular search results.
Starting around 3:45 Pacific Time today, those searching on topics that are spiking or “hot” in popularity should see a new [...]

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It appears Google has pulled together a bunch of statistics throughout the web and created a small landing page named Google Internet Stats on the Google UK front. The page explains that this service “brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place.” Google collected this data from many third party [...]

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The Google Blog announced a new trends project named within Google Finance named Google Domestic Trends. In short, Google tracks searches on Google.com and then groups those search volume metrics into industry sectors. Google will then plot the search volume by several industry sectors on a trends graph and allow you to then [...]

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Google Trends has released an embeddable widget that you can place on your website. The annoying thing is that you can’t set what terms you want to appear on the widget. So, I’m stuck copying and pasting code featuring the default terms, which today are the top four contestants on American Idol (which was reduced to three last night), when I’d rather compare teams who made the playoffs in the NHL!

Still, users, if they know what the heck they’re doing, can click the “edit” button next to the terms and enter their own terms to compare. Try it for yourself below:

Related Reading:
Does Google Analytics Share Data with Google Trends and Ad Planner?
Google Trends for Websites Adds to Comparison Sites Confusion
New Version of Google Trends Released

A reader tipped us off to how ASCII art of an airplane is showing up in the number two position at Google Trends. When we first looked ourselves, we thought the image was that of an airplane approaching a landing strip. But a reader suggests it represents a far more disturbing scene, that of [...]

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If you missed my posts on Monday, it’s because I was up at 3am blowing chunks into the porcelain throne the night before. It takes a lot for me to not blog, even when I’m sick, so you know I was hit with something awful. And no, I wasn’t hungover.

Instead, as I later found out, I fell victim to this year’s stomach bug. I picked it up at a holiday party here in Ohio, where I am doing the annual visit the in-laws thing. After garnering enough energy by Monday afternoon to Tweet about my ordeal, I learned from the @ replies, that I was not alone.

The stomach bug was not only afflicting others in Ohio, but a search on Google News revealed that it had earlier been spreading in the western part of my home state of North Carolina and throughout the U.S.

I also learned that the British were more likely to call it “norovirus” and that it was spreading like wildfire throughout the UK. (It is also called the “Norwalk virus” which is only completely ironic since I’m in Norwalk, Ohio.)

The stomach bug is not generally deadly, though it gives symptoms that send many to the emergency room. But it’s lack of lethal-ness is perhaps the reason why Google has not been officially tracking it like it did the flu.

But oh - what a public service if it did! So, I went to Google Trends to see for myself how “stomach bug” and “norovirus” were, um, trending:

As you can see, the ailment is actually trending lower this year than in previous years, but it is on the rise.

Here are some tips to keep this trending lower:

Prevention Tips from the CDC:

• Frequently wash your hands, especially after toilet visits and changing diapers and before eating or preparing food.
• Carefully wash fruits and vegetables, and steam oysters before eating them.
• Thoroughly clean and disinfect contaminated surfaces immediately after an episode of illness by using a bleach-based household cleaner.
• Immediately remove and wash clothing or linens that may be contaminated with virus after an episode of illness (use hot water and soap).
• Flush or discard any vomitus and/or stool in the toilet and make sure that the surrounding area is kept clean.

Treatment Tips from the CDC

• Get hydrated The vomitting and diarrhea dehydrate you. Drink water, oral rehydration fluids (ORF), or juice. Sports drinks will not work in this case.
• Stay away from people You’re contagious from the moment you get the bug until 3 days after.
• If symptoms persist, see a doctor The stomach bug should go away in 24-48 hours. If it doesn’t, get medical attention.

Google’s official list of the most popular search activity for 2008, aka Zeitgeist, has yet to make its debut, but the search giant has been leaking out tasty tidbits of data to get us salivating for even more search data.
The fastest-rising search terms of 2008…

Wondering if it’s just you or if others have the flu, too? Google’s announced a new tool that tells you. Google Flu Trends allows you to see flu activity across the United States.
How’s Google doing this? Is it now indexing actual human beings, in the way it does web pages? Nah….