Webware

Google on Tuesday unveiled a new site to track the progress of the common cold.

Using the same keyword tracking technology found on Google Trends, it keeps an eye on people searching for queries involving the word "flu" and tracks them both by date and location.

What makes the technology so fascinating is that its data set goes back to 2003, and has been cross-referenced with the last several years of survey data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Google says that because its own system is based on a constant flow of searches as opposed to surveying techniques it's able to provide results one to two weeks faster than the CDC.

The same trending technique could be used in tandem with other organizations to track contagious viruses or threats besides the common cold, including AIDS, bird flu, and Africanized honey bees.

One limitation of the current system is that it does not track worldwide flu traffic. There is, however, quite a bit to discover from data from years prior--especially when you get several years that stack up on top of each other with similar rises and falls during certain parts of the year. According to Google's chart, we're about three weeks from hitting the heavy season, which goes until early January.

Google Flu Trends tracks flu activity across the United States.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

Early Tuesday Google posted some insights on the hottest search terms, as marked on its trends site. Not surprisingly, the majority of search queries within the U.S. have been related to politics, with a staggering 87 out of the top 100 relating in some way to today's election.

What might be more amazing is that in front of information about the candidates, most searchers are simply looking for free handouts from fast food companies.

Buried within the top 100 terms are searches for fast food and drink locations like Chick-Fil-A, Ben and Jerry's, Starbucks, and Krispy Kreme--all of which are offering freebie food and drink items to customers who come in with voting stickers (which incidentally is the 20th most searched for term).

Meanwhile, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin is not on the list, and presidential nominees John McCain and Barack Obama only make it on there once and twice, respectively.

Starbucks shows up four times.

In addition to Tuesday's results, Google has been keeping track of search trends since the beginning of September, and posted the top searches for personas, topics, and news sources. There are only a few surprises on these lists, like Saturday Night Live's Tina Fey grabbing the No. 4 spot on the personas list, just two below Palin who Fey has been impersonating on the popular late night TV show. Also, many political blogs like the Huffington Post, the Drudge Report, and Daily Kos are seemingly overtaking mainstream news sources like NBC, CBS, and ABC. (CBS is the parent company of CNET News, which publishes Webware.) CNN is No. 9 on the list.

With election season coming to a close later Tuesday (hopefully), there are still unnamed winners of search likely to be announced next month, when Google releases its end-of-year zeitgeist. In the meantime, you can continue to watch the top 100 trends page as it's likely to change throughout the day.

Performance-monitoring firm Pingdom thinks we should look at social networks differently.

The popularity of a social site such as MySpace or Twitter is frequently measured in unique users, page views, or user registrations. But a recent ministudy by Pingdom chose instead to look at how much of a proportional lock a given social network has on the countries' Web users. The tool of choice was Google Insights for Search, which was formally launched earlier this week.

Facebook, for example, started in the United States and still has more members there than in any other country. But there's more proportional "interest" in Facebook in Turkey, based on Google searches for the term. In second place is Canada, followed by the United Kingdom, South Africa, and Colombia.

For MySpace, the U.S. ranks at the top of the list when it comes to regional interest, followed by Puerto Rico, Australia, the U.K., and Malaysia. Beyond that, many American-founded social networks are much more popular overseas than at home: Friendster, which recently affirmed its focus on Asian countries, gathers the most "interest" in the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Myanmar, respectively. The top five Google Insights locations for Hi5, founded in San Francisco, are Peru, Portugal, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, and Costa Rica.

The rest of Pingdom's results can be found on the company's blog.

Google has taken its popular Google Trends and launched a spin-off product called Google Insights for Search. Geared toward advertisers, it's a tool to track a particular search term's popularity across the Web and geographic regions of the world.

For Google, this can help boost advertiser confidence and potentially win its program some new converts who would've otherwise been skeptical regarding how effectively they could target an online ad campaign.

With Google Insights for Search, you can search for a term to track how much it's been googled over time, where on a "heat map" it's most popular, and what the top "related" and "rising" searches for the term are.

Results can also be filtered by geographic region, time frame, or category. Let's say you search for "spears," and most of the results on Google Insights for Search deal with some trashy pop star. But you happen to be the owner of a small business that creates replica medieval weapons, so that's not the sort of spears you're looking for. You can narrow your search down to a single field--"industries," say, or "recreation," and hope you see fewer instances of Britney and Jamie Lynn.

Here's another one: search for "spaghetti," and you'll get a lot of results about people seeking recipes. But narrow it down to the "lifestyles" category, and you'll see that most of the search results that Google Insights provides involve the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Google Trends, a service Google started two years ago to track searched-for keywords, has unveiled a new tool for inquiring minds looking to find out more on any given site. Like tracking services Compete and Alexa which use tool bars to grab user data, Google Trends now lets you pop in specific domains and compare basic traffic information about any .com site (or .tv, .biz, .net, and so on) using nothing more than organic user searches.

Included are daily traffic numbers in users (sent from Google search), where in the world the users are coming from, and related sites that were either searched for or visited in that same session. All of this information is color coded, and up to five sites at a time can be pitted head-to-head, with bar graphs and charts for each.

The service marks a notable openness for Google, which is privy to keeping its data locked up tight. It also appears to not tap into the data dug up by its own site reporting tool Google Analytics, which is used in many sites across the Web. As Barry Schwartz over at SearchEngineLand notes, it's also a great way to figure out related keywords and searches from people visiting your site, and those of your competitors--which is more than you get from Google's own AdWord choosing tools. I regularly bother my colleague Rafe Needleman to help me dig up similar sites to something I'm writing about, but with this tool I'll be able to use the wisdom of the crowd to do it for me.

One of the more interesting uses for this is comparing sites with traffic that surges around product releases. In the screenshot below are sites that cover Apple. Despite the minor differences, you can clearly see huge surges at various points in the year. In practice, you can cross-reference this with product keywords (still using Google Trends) and the data magically lines up.

Comparing these Apple-centric sites to one another on Google Trends can prove useful. In this case we see huge surges during product announcements. With Google Trends you could compare this site data to keyword searches too.

(Credit: CNET Networks)