Clinton, Obama or McCain - Let Google decide!

Google Trends lets you compare up to five terms to see how often they've been searched on Google over a specific period of time. When no special searches are done, Google Trends also shows how frequently the terms appeared in Google News and also splits the popularity of these searches by geographic regions. So what does Google Trends show when it comes to compare the number of searches done for Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain?

This graph contains data for the last 12 months, and was restricted to US only. Leaving politics aside, Google Trends is a great tool especially for search engine marketers - this is because it lets you see the popularity of a particular term, and also to compare up to five terms to see which one has more searches than the other. Not sure if to optimize for sitemap or site map? See what Google Trends says. Of course that in order to see any data for the search/comparison, the terms have to have a certain popularity.

Other interesting features that Google Trends offers:

• you can put the terms with quotes to see the trend for that specific term (just like when you want to do an exact search), though in this case you will not see the news search part


• you can use the "-" sign to exclude a specific word from the searches. Say you want to search for sitemap but don't want to include the searches that included the word google you would put in sitemap-google


• you can use the "|" sign as the OR operator. Say you want to see the trends for searches that were done for either sitemap OR google, you would put in sitemap | google.


• don't kow what to blog about? You can see which searches are Hot in this particular day right on the main page of Google Trends. The Hot Trends are updated daily.

Fun but useful tool isn't it? However, if you want to use it for more serious things make sure you realize the data is approximated, and as they say it:

The data Google Trends produces may contain inaccuracies for a number of reasons, including data-sampling issues and a variety of approximations that Trends makes use of. We hope you find this service interesting and entertaining, but you probably don't want to write your Ph.D