Earlier today, I was checking out some new questions in the TechCrunch topic area on Quora. One in particular caught my eye: How was TechCrunch traffic affected by their major redesign in July 2011?
This has been something I’ve seen asked here and there given the radical changes we implemented — and, I assume, given the audience issues Gawker faced after their recent redesign. Mostly, people seem to want to know: is TechCrunch tanking?
I was set to weigh in, when I noticed that someone else already had. This person (not affiliated with TechCrunch) painted a picture in which our site was essentially crashing and burning since the redesign (the answer has since been removed by Quora, presumably due to down-voting). Their source? Compete. → Read More
Look, I know Farmville is popular. Okay, really popular. Okay, insanely popular. And while it does have plenty of mainstream appeal, I still find it hard to believe that it has controlled two of the top “Hot Searches” items (for the U.S.) all day long on Google. And yet, according to Google Trends, both “farmville.com the game,” and “www.farmville.com the game” are the number two and three hottest search items today, respectively. So what’s going on?
Well, if you click through to the detail page for either of the two queries, the answer appears to reside there. First of all, there are a bunch of borderline spam sites suggesting the game launched today on the website Farmville.com. That’s not true, it has actually been there for several months, using Facebook Connect. But still, that doesn’t appear to be what’s causing the “On Fire” surge. That may be something much more interesting. → Read More
Google has Google Trends, Twitter has trending topics, and now so does Wikipedia. Pete Skomoroch, a Senior Research Scientist at LinkedIn and blogger at Data Wrangling, built a trending topics page for Wikipedia. The homepage ranks the top-25 Wikipedia articles with the most pageviews over the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past 24 hours.
Some of the most popular Wikipedia articles in the past month include ones on the Perseids meteor shower, Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted, director John Hughes, and G.I. Joe: The Rise Of Cobra. These are quite different than the types of search trends you would find on Google trends or realtime trending topics on Twitter. → Read More
Google Trends is a great tool to get an overview on terms people are searching for with the largest search engine in the world. It also shows interesting trends. And something is definitely going on with searches for a few large social networks using Google.
At some point in mid January, a group of sites including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Flickr, and Foursquare saw a huge drop in number of searches for their domains. → Read More
Earlier today, the U.S. declared a public health emergency over the Swine Flu, after confirming 20 cases of the flu spreading to humans in New York, Ohio, Kansas, Texas and California. More than 80 people have died in Mexico from the disease, which has potentially spread to other countries, including Canada and France. Although Federal officials are urging Americans not to panic about the disease, fear of contracting the potentially deadly flu is quickly spreading over Twitter, Google, and blogs across the web.
Swine Flu is the top trending topic on Twitter at the moment, with users rapidly tweeting about the latest news about the disease, including whether it has spread to other states, the Center for Disease Control’s announcement, etc. → Read More
Google Trends, which shows you the hot search queries on Google at any given time, is more than two years old now (this year they added website/domain tracking as well). PR professionals and brand managers use it regularly to track how hot their assets are, and there are countless other uses for the service.
One use though, which is becoming increasingly popular we hear, is for blogs, mainstream media sites and others to monitor Google Trends regularly and write stories based on hot terms. Google displays a daily summary for easier data gathering.
The goal isn’t to tap into what Internet users think is interesting and write about that. Instead, it’s all about getting more hits from Google.
Here’s how it works: → Read More
[photopress:googletrendstide.jpg,full,left] The New Hampshire primary was yesterday, but you won’t find either winner (John McCain and Hillary Clinton) in the top 10 of Google Trends. You will, however, find a relatively unknown, sort of a long shot candidate as number two. Jimmy Tide, who not only wears the cleanest shirts but who also promises to clean up America. I’d like to see other, more “mainstream” candidates promise what Tide has promised. I get it, by the way. Google Trends, January 8, 2008 [Google] → Read More
Google Trends launched today. It’s another analysis tool (and a good one), that allows you to see how often specific search terms are being entered into the Google search engine. Up to five terms can be compared. And you can also view queries that contain either or two terms, using a vertical bar “|”. More advanced queries can be done as well – see the FAQs for details. Google also puts markers next to major news events that are about that search query, helping to explain surges. Data can be sorted by time, language, geographic location, etc. In testing it I’m finding it works well for very highly searched terms, but terms that are very rarely searched show no data at all. Seeing trends on even obscure terms would be useful. Even so, Steve Rubel says Google Trends is “a must-bookmark for every PR person and marketer worldwide.” → Read More
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