It’s that time of year

May 11th, 2006

The sun is shining in the UK, probably more so at Mountain View where Google recently held their 2006 press day. Well worth a read through, Matt admirably tried to do the world’s first “live” blogcast but seems his fingers couldn’t quite keep up. Although the post stops and starts and has a few bits missing, it’s a very interesting read with Google answering almost all questions and being very transparent. I won’t repost here, but check it out - it’s worth a read.

Google Trends In typical Google fashion, with no fanfare, Google Trends slipped out live. Interesting, addictive, useful, but scary. Interestingly, Google Trends will show you the relative search frequency of chosen words/phrases over the last 2-3 years. You can overlay multiple queries and a comparative graph is plotted. Addictive with the combinations you can try and seeing the relative patterns - [flowers, mother’s day] for example. How useful is it? I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface. You can target specific months, years, countries or regions - or have a comparative overview. Is your product/service aimed at one country? Would it be better off in another? What time of year is best to launch your campaign? Which keyterms should you target? Were the trends caused by a seasonal or news event? Scary, all of this information is provided instantly. Big thumbs up from zoomzoom. I’m sure I’ll have more to write about this later.

Google Co-op Google Co-op is a bit harder to explain, here’s what Google have to say:

Google Co-op is a community of organizations, businesses, and individuals working together to help improve Google search. The benefit to you as a Google user is new ways to quickly refine your searches to find what you’re looking for more quickly. Check out the Google Co-op directory for a list of providers who have contributed labels and subscribed links that you can add to your Google search results.

So how does this work? Essentially the system is based on contributors and subscribers. A contributor will generally be someone who is an expert in their field. So for example, if you were a Doctor of Neurology you could become a contributor. Your job would be then to “tag” pages that you think provide accurate and helpful information. You then can specify search terms that you think relate to the page, as well as title and annotate the page. The other side of the coin is the subscriber. The med student who can’t find a specific piece of information they are looking for. They can subscribe to the contributor’s feed which will then display the pages they have tagged if they trigger terms are used.

If that’s not enough, based on the data entered Google will also offer relevant other terms to try and look for intent behind the search. If someone is searching for Santana, are they looking for the car brand or the baseball team? If your contributions are consistently popular they will actually be integrated with the standard Google search. This kind of “shared personalised search” is looking to be the way forward. In a way Google is using distributed workloads to manually weed out spam and lead the way for relevant search results. In theory, if all pages on the web were tagged and subscribed to, then ranked by the popularity, there would be nowhere for spammers/black hatters to hide. Great news and always good to see the glint of innovation that keeps Google in its dominant position.