Searching the Search Engine

Blog 4/13
OMG GOOGLE TRENDZ IS SOOOOO FUN!!!! <3

Part I.

Sorry for the girly text to start it out, but for real, my buddies and I have had fun with google trends in the past, being able to pick out which dates coincided with popular trends or events. Contrary to what we previously thought, though, if you search both "penguins" and "porn", it will not tell you which dates people searched for penguin-porno.

Part II.

Now that I am completely adequate in the art of using google trends, lets pick a topic to research. How about...

Some web searchers are looking for a particular web site that they already have in mind (last page of Bartelle). That is, they don't search for "social networking service," they search for "facebook." Use google trends to investigate website names (like brands) that people use as keywords. Try to compare prominent web sites or brands that do similar things (popular music sites, television networks, etc.). How do these compare to generic words and phrases that mean the same thing?

Part III.

Now lets pick out things that are actually significant about the peaks and valleys of these trends...

First I started off by cross referencing "Athletic shoes", "nike.com" and "adidas.com". This was not the type of result I was expecting after reading Bartelle's info. According to a bullet point on the reading, 25% of people have specific websites in mind when they make their searches, so I figured that Nike and Adidas would both be around 25% of the search volume that "athletic shoes" had. (Note: this specific search was just for the year of 2010.) I was quite wrong, as Nike was dominating the search quantity. As shown in the picture, Nike was quite a bit ahead of everything else, and Adidas on average was even a little bit higher than the general term. My estimation is that since Nike is a humongous company in the States, that America dominates the Nike shirts, where as the European native (and soccer driven, may I add) Adidas gets most of the searches in England and Brazil by comparison, both of which are heavy soccer playing nations.

Google trends for athletic shoes

Overall since both of these companies are multi-billion dollar organizations, and have their names out there already, maybe this wasn't a fair assessment of the rule in Bartelle's writing. So, my next search was going to have to be different. I thought "Washing machine" could be a fair test if i also entered "Kenmore" and "whirlpool", two of the top brands in appliance, yet not as wildly popular names as Nike and Adidas.

It turns out though, that there was another monopoly in this business, as Whirlpool dominate the searches by a good margin. Kenmore was actually searched just about as much as "washing machine" was. My results have shown one thing, and that is the prominence of "commercial searches," opposed to the "informational searches," as stated in the Bartelle reading (Bartelle, The Search, 28-30). It appeared that the people who were searching the brand names first were more interested in buying right away, and had the idea already set in their mind of what brand they wanted. For the remaining percentage, they were informational, or looking for facts about the products in order to make informed decisions about which product to buy.