This week's assignment: Try out one of the Google programs or services, and write a brief blog post reviewing it. What do you like about the Google product? What do you dislike? Would you recommend the product to friends and colleagues?
I decided to explore the Trends product since I'd never seen it before. Trends is a search and news volume index that after you plug in a search term, it gives you a graph that follows how popular that term has been in Internet searches for the past few years. It provides a bit of insight as to the fluctuations in an item's popularity, and also links spikes in popularity with news stories from that time. I did a search for "fried chicken" and the graphs are below:
The top blue line is represents the number of searches made for "fried chicken." As you can see, there was a big spike in popularity in early 2009, and the "E" links to a news story about KFC honouring Oprah's grilled chicken coupons...
Google Trends also ranks the search term by popularity of searching in Regions, Cities and Languages. Who knew that fried chicken was so popular in South Africa?
Even better, you can enter more than one search term into the box (which I love), and compare two different things, or perhaps track the popularity of similar things. For example, you could see if "high cholesterol, fast food" have anything to do with each other... or see just how popular something new is, like KFC's new Double Down sandwich, which features two pieces of fried chicken where the pieces of the bun would usually be.
Google Trends will only get better with age, because the longer we are using the Internet, the longer the search results will be in terms of date. Currently, we can only go back about six years, but in ten years from now we'll have data for sixteen years! I would definitely recommend this to folks interested in tracking the popularity of something, or even if they just had to do a bit of research on something specific.
Try it out for yourself: http://www.google.ca/trends
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