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.

Dear Internet, I thought we’ve been over this? If you cite Compete or Alexa for anything other than making fun of them, you’re officially a moron. How bad is their data? Well, in the case of Compete, if you reversed their chart, then it would be much closer to being correct than it currently is. I seriously wonder if they’re tracking anti-visits or some new metaphysical stat I’m not aware of?

TechCrunch will set a new all-time record for traffic this month (both in uniques and pageviews), breaking the previous record — set last month. And that broke the previous record set the month before that. In other words, things are on the up and up. How do I know this? I have the luxury of seeing directly-measured results from both Google Analytics and WordPress.com’s own analytics area. Both confirm that Compete and Alexa are absolutely worthless when it comes to this type of measurement.

I mean seriously, the data from each service is so bad that I’m not clear how either is still operating. I have to cut the stat-searching public some slack because they are two of the only free public tools out there for gauging traffic data. But seriously, you’d be better off just guessing.

Yes, Quantcast is much better, but they have their own issues too, which is why we don’t expose data publicly that way.

The newer Google Trends for Websites seemed to be halfway decent for a while, but in the past year, they’ve also fallen off a cliff in terms of accuracy, it seems. Given that Google never talks about this product any more, I’m going to assume it’s one of many that has fallen into neglect — which is too bad.

As for Alexa, which is owned by Amazon, I have no idea what’s wrong with them. It seems to be more of a landing page for advertisements above all else now.

And yes, I know Compete focuses on U.S. Internet usage. But looking at our charts, that segment of the data is even more inaccurate when compared to reality. Compete has always been rather quiet about the way they actually gather data — and at times, it has sounded rather sketchy — but the fact of the matter remains constant: the data stinks.

But I will give Compete some credit: their data showcasing their own downfall does appear to be fairly accurate, as backed up by comScore.

As for the Quora question itself, I answered it there. Long story short: traffic is up pretty significantly since the redesign. Thanks all!

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.

It looks like queries are on fire because Google is tying in searches for “republicans” and “what is in the health care bill” to these Farmville searches, for some unknown reason. Both of those queries appear in the “Related searches” area for both of those Farmville queries. Seeing as just about all anyone in the United States is talking about is the House’s passing of the new health care bill, and the strong Republican opposition to it, it’s no wonder these queries are exploding.

Meanwhile, according to Google Trends, “health reform bill summary” is only the 14th most popular search, just behind “chris johnson s car.“

At this point, we’re going to assume this is simply a Google mix-up and not some type of 4chan-style gaming of Google. But if anyone has more info, feel free to leave it in the comments or send it in: tips [at] techcrunch.com.

[Thanks Shmuel]

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. Even the trending topics over the past 24 hours (District 9, Woodstock Festival, Usain Bolt, Gina Carano) are quite different than the hot searches on Google. And, no, I have no idea why Perseids was the top trending topic last month, it is usually visible in the summer.

You can search for any topic, and the you will get a chart showing pageview trends, along with the actual article placed in an iFrame below the chart. It’s as good a way as any to explore Wikipedia. The site is built on Cloudera’s version of Hadoop.

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. Now, to be clear, these are only searches for the .com names, for example, “facebook.com” and “youtube.com” and not just the terms “facebook” and “youtube” themselves. Still, across the board, traffic had been rising for these .com domains and then at the same time all dropped off a cliff.

One might think this has to do with the China situation (Google warned it might have to pull out of China after saying it would remove previous restraints on searches). But drilling down into the data shows that while the searches from China did take a big fall, they did as well from other countries around the world too.

Other sites saw drops as well, but by far these large social sites saw the most pronounced drops that all seem to be aligned. Weirdly, google.com did not see any drop (though I’m not sure who uses Google to google google.com).

We’ve reached out to Google for some clarification or insight into this and will update when we hear back. The logical answer would seem to be that they switched something in mid-January that led to these huge drops in social site searches on Google, but who knows. Maybe we have a wild honey bee extinction situation going on here within Google.

Update: Google’s own Orkut.com also seeing a drop. As are several popular European social sites like Tuenti.com.

[via Mrinal]

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.

Google Trends reports that “Swine Flu Ohio” is the 27th most popular search keyword currently, with searches for the “CDC” and “Swine Flu Symptoms” also making the top 100 keyword searches on Google.

Google Maps have also been created to chart the spread of the Swine Flu. Below is a Google Map created by a bio medical engineer, that charts suspect and confirmed cases of the Swine Flu in the U.S. and Mexico.

Technorati’s index, which graphs the number of times the search term occurs in blog posts across the web, shows that mentions of Swine Flu in blog posts has risen sharply from Friday to nearly 2800 blog post mentions today.

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:

Blogs and mainstream media sites are indexed by Google very frequently. Many times per day, in fact. And those sites often have great Page Rank already. Combine that regular indexing and Page Rank with Google’s recent policy of ranking news type results higher than older, evergreen stuff, and you have a system ripe for abuse.

Let’s say I run a popular political or celebrity gossip site (two topics that pop up a lot on Google Trends). I look for hot queries that people are typing in right now, for whatever reason. Then I write a blog post, making sure to use the query term in the title of the post (which weights heavier for matching content to specific queries). The content of the article itself is mostly irrelevant, as long as your normal readers don’t gag on it.

Within a few minutes that content is indexed by Google, and the high Page Rank of the site along with the newness of the content pushes it up towards to top of the first page of results. Possibly all the way to the top.

We’re not talking about a trivial amount of traffic, either. One person I spoke with about this yesterday said he can get up to 30,000 extra unique visitors per day just by focusing content on top queries, which is more than enough to dedicate a couple of full time people to the effort.

I’ve debated (with myself) on how “bad” this kind of behavior really is. Sites that do this are clearly exploiting a weakness in Google’s search methodology, but it’s not like they’re engaging in black hat SEO tactics to trick Google into thinking their content is more relevant than it is. Rather, they’re just using their Page Rank heft and cheating a little on the edges.

I’m not going to say which sites I’m hearing are doing this, but you can check for yourself. If you see a headline that seems a little off topic or weird, followed by some very hastily written content, have a quick look at Google Trends and see if the exact query is in the title of the post or article. You may be surprised at who’s taking advantage of this.

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]

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.”