17.3.08

Google-Trends India

About Google Trends India
With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions.

About Hot Trends
With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of today's top 100 fastest-rising search queries. You can also select a recent date in history to see what the top rising searches were.

1. How does Google Trends work?

Google analyzes a portion of web searches to compute how many searches have been done, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time.

2. How does Hot Trends work?

Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like "weather," Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. The algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.

For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities. It also displays news, blog, and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today.

Hot Trends is updated hourly. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.

3. How many terms can I compare? Any other functionality?

You can compare up to five terms by separating each with a comma. To compare trend info for "bollywood" and "hollywood," for example, simply enter bollywood, hollywood and click "Search Trends."

To see how many searches contained either of two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: "|". For example, to determine how many searches contained the terms "mittens" or "gloves," just enter bollywood | hollywood.

To compare multi-word terms, use parentheses. To see how many searches were done for either "bollywood music" or "music," for instance, just enter (bollywood music) | music (if you don't use parentheses, your query will be interpreted to mean all searches for "bollywood music" or "hollywood music").

You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign.

To see how many searches contained the term "maps" butnot "google," for instance, just enter maps-google. To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you've entered them, you can put your terms in quotation marks. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)

Note: when you use any of these advanced features -- quotation marks, minus signs, or vertical bars -- Google Trends will only display the search-volume graph.

4. Can I change the time frame, region, or sub-region of the results?

You can use the drop-down boxes under the search volume graph of the Google Trends results page to restrict your results to a particular time frame or region. The restrictions will affect both the search-volume and news-reference-volume graphs, and the city, region, and language data that appear below the graphs, though news-reference volume may not be available on a per region basis.

When you restrict your results to a specific year or multi-year period, each point on the graph will represent a week's worth of searches. When you restrict the results to a specific month, each point on the graph will represent one day of searches. You can now also select a time frame of the last 30 days or 12 months.

To view the results for a particular sub-region, just use the drop-down boxes or click on the link for a particular country or sub-region on the results page.

5. How do the Cities, Regions, Sub-regions and Languages work?

Google Trends uses IP address information from server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.

6. How does counting and ranking of the Top Cities, Regions and Languages work, and what does 'normalized' mean?

For counting and ranking cities, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which it received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities' ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.

Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized. This means it divided the sets of data by a common variable to cancel out the variable's effect on the data and allow the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. If it didn't normalize the results, and instead displayed the absolute rankings of cities, they wouldn't be all that interesting. For example, New York city would be the top city for many results because there are lots of searches from there.

7. What about my personal search data?

Your personal search data remains safe and private. The graphs are based on aggregated data from millions of searches done on Google over time. And the results Google Trends displays are produced entirely by an automated formula.

8. How accurate and up-to-date is the information?

Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means it's still in its early stages of development. The data Google Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues.


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