Google starts predicting the future
Google has expanded one of its web analytics tool so that it now tries to predict future search trends.
Digital marketers have long tried to anticipate what keyword terms are likely to become more popular in the coming months and acquire them for their targeted PPC campaigns.
Now the Californian technology giant is trying to provide this information with its Insights for Search tool by analysing historical trends and extrapolating what might happen in the future.
Data for individual countries can also be isolated and compared via printable graphs.
How it works
For example, by contrasting the historic popularity of the term ‘ski’ in both the US and Australia it emerges that American search frequency peaks at the start and end of the year while Australia peaks in the middle of the year, reflecting the seasonal nature of the activity.
Google Insights for Search then takes this data and formulates a graph predicting that the trend will continue in 2009 and 2010.
Meanwhile, the forecast for ‘hotels’ in the UK reflects that search frequency typically peaks in January and August and also that the overall number of searches has been in steady decline over recent years.
Google researchers have stated that categories such as travel, food and health are more conducive to search forecasts than entertainment and social networking keywords, many of which will be displayed without predictions of future popularity.
It has been a busy period for Google engineers. Last week, digital marketers were given their first chance to preview Google Caffeine, a search engine upgrade boasting “next-generation architecture”.
