Don’t Just Google It: Google Top Chart to Help Your Business Research

If you haven’t been using Google Trends to help with your business, you’re missing out. It does more than just tell you what the latest hot searches are. Under the Explore menu, you’re able to analyze search terms of your choice, found out when they were popular, where they came from, and what search phrases they appear in.

This can be incredibly useful in conjunction with other analytics that tell you how google searches drive traffic to your site: you can find out if certain events drive searches, how  better to optimize your content to pick up on broader search trends, and the like. But Google’s analysis of its own search trends doesn’t stop there.

Just a few days ago, Google released a new way to track search trends. Called Top Charts, it appears to be a simple tool: it tells you the search trends for given topics from actors to whiskey. It’s a pretty simple idea that has pretty powerful implications. Like their knowledge graph that shows up on the side of many of their searches, Google has been working not just to provide us with webpages that have the words we want, but also with the actual knowledge we’re searching for. Read More

What Facebook’s New Social Graph Search May Mean for Small Businesses

facebook open graphMuch has already been made of Facebook’s big press conference yesterday where Mark Zuckerberg unveiled new Social Graph Search. But what is it, exactly?

In a lot of ways, Facebook Graph Search makes a lot of sense intuitively: enough that it’s almost a surprise that we haven’t had it before. Basically, it’s using the ties between us all and all the data Facebook has to spit back out search results. Given how much data Facebook has, it’s easy to imagine that Graph Search could be pretty powerful.

Facebook itself gave several examples of how this kind of search will work. One idea was using interests or likes of your friends to find compatible invitees for a movie night. But for a less personal (but more far-reaching) example, Facebook point out how a journalist might use the Social Graph. You can read their official post here for a thorough explanation, but the basic idea is that journalists will be able to use FB as a Rolodex. You could look up people by where they worked when, or if Facebook Places has them at the scene of a big event.

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Yahoo Axis: Aging Search Giant Making A Huge Step Into the Future with Hot New Service

In a time when the word “Google” is synonymous with searching the Internet, have you been wondering what some of those old search engines of yore are up to?  I know that I have.  I have to say that it seems that Yahoo! has not let the world pass them by, with their new Axis product they have impressed me by embracing the modern mobile culture.

The basic idea behind this product is a solid one.  Your web browsing experience follows you from device to device, from platform to platform.  If mobile productivity is your thing, then this simple concept is appealing to you, seamless movement from tablet to desktop with no syncing, really no thinking is required. Read More