Comments on: People Looking for a “Silver Lining” But Buying “Ammo”

By: Editor

Editor — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 16:01:16 +0000

JJ, you bring up a whole bunch of different issues:

1. The effectiveness or accuracy of Google Trends.
2. Search volume (in relative terms)
3. What people are searching for.

I can’t address any of those.

The value Google Trends clearly provides is as a gauge with respect to whether a single search is occurring more or less frequently. It’s a barometer. It indicates “direction” only.

By: JJ Hornblass

JJ Hornblass — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 02:34:01 +0000

Jeffry, good post. I just had a couple of questions. I was wondering about the “online banking” conclusion you came to. You noted that search activity for “online banking” has found “phenomenal” growth over the last couple of years. However, when you compare that to “Twitter,” is the search activity really that significant. You are talking about a search volume index in the 3-4 range vs. an index of more than 10 for “Twitter.”

Finally, I took a look through the hot trends of today (http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X). There was not what I would consider a substantive subject on the entire list of the 100 more common searches for March 11. What do you make of that? Does it kind of minimize the value of Google Trends?

By: Kate Thompson

Kate Thompson — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 01:48:17 +0000

Google Trends is a great tool – I was surprised when I queried “superannuation” here in Australia, that I didn’t see a more upward trend.