Google Insights generates reports on search volume, allowing you to see what people are searching for online.
Determining the public’s interest in a subject has become increasingly easy in the Internet era. One of the tools that facilitates these measurements is Google Insights. The site allows you to input terms and receive of a graph of “search volume” on any given topic over a period of time. It mashes the results up with relevant news stories to attempt to provide causes for a chart’s peaks and valleys and can be narrowed down to particular geographic areas. For a similar service from Google with a slightly different feature set, check out Google Trends.
To see Insights in action, check out this page with an Insights report for the term “Fort Hood”. You can see how the searches spiked as the news of the shooting broke, and see related terms people were searching such as “shooting”, “texas” and “fort hood victims”. The page also includes a map that allows you to see how the search happened over time geographically, which illustrates a nationwide peak with sustained interest in the state of Texas. This information can be helpful in everything from in understanding your users and even in headline writing.
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