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With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.About Hot Trends

With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what’s on the public’s collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of today’s top 100 fastest-rising search queries in the U.S. You can also select a recent date in history to see what the top rising searches were and what the search activity looked like over the course of that day. We update Hot Trends hourly.

1. How does Google Trends work?Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the results — our search-volume graph — plotted on a linear scale.

Located just beneath our search-volume graph is our news-reference-volume graph. This graph shows you the number of times your topic appeared in Google News stories. When Google Trends detects a spike in the volume of news stories for a particular term, it labels the graph and displays the headline of an automatically selected Google News story written near the time of that spike. Currently, only English-language headlines are displayed, but we hope to support non-English headlines in the future.

Below the search and news volume graphs, Google Trends displays the top cities, regions, and languages in which people searched for the first term you entered.

2. How does Hot Trends work?

Hot Trends reflects what people are searching for on Google today. Rather than showing the most popular searches overall, which would always be generic terms like “weather,” Hot Trends highlights searches that have sudden surges in popularity. Our algorithm analyzes millions of web searches performed on Google and displays those searches that deviate the most from their historic traffic pattern. The algorithm also filters out spam and removes inappropriate material.

For each search, Hot Trends shows related searches, a search-volume graph, and the top cities. We also display news, blog, and web results to help give context about why a search may be appearing on the Hot Trends list today. Hot Trends is updated hourly. You can also choose a date in the past to see what the top Hot Trends for that date were.

3. How many terms can I compare? And what other functionality is available?

You can compare up to five terms by separating each with a comma. To compare trend info for “mittens” and “bathing suits,” for example, simply enter mittens, bathing suits and click “Search Trends.”

To see how many searches contained either of two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: “|”. For example, to determine how many searches contained the terms “mittens” or “gloves,” just enter mittens | gloves.

To compare multi-word terms, use parentheses. To see how many searches were done for either “winter mittens” or “gloves,” for instance, just enter (winter mittens) | gloves (if you don’t use parentheses, your query will be interpreted to mean all searches for “winter mittens” or “winter gloves”).

You can also exclude terms from your search by using the minus sign. To see how many searches contained the term “maps” butnot “google,” for instance, just enter maps-google.

To restrict your results to only those searches that contain your terms in the specific order you’ve entered them, you can put your terms in quotation marks. (By default, Google Trends will show you all searches that contain the terms you entered in any order.)

Note: when you use any of these advanced features — quotation marks, minus signs, or vertical bars — Google Trends will only display the search-volume graph. The news portion of the product doesn’t support advanced functionality at this time.

4. How can I change the time frame, region, or sub-region (state or province) of the results? You can use the drop-down boxes under the search volume graph of the Google Trends results page to restrict your results to a particular time frame or region. The restrictions will affect both the search-volume and news-reference-volume graphs, and the city, region, and language data that appear below the graphs, though news-reference volume may not be available on a per region basis.

When you restrict your results to a specific year or multi-year period, each point on the graph will represent a week’s worth of searches. When you restrict the results to a specific month, each point on the graph will represent one day of searches. You can now also select a time frame of the last 30 days or 12 months. To view the results for a particular sub-region, just use the drop-down boxes or click on the link for a particular country or sub-region on the Google Trends results page.

5. How do the Cities, Regions, Sub-regions and Languages work?

Google Trends uses IP address information from our server logs to make a best guess about where queries originated. Language information is determined by the language version of the Google site on which the search was originally entered.

6. How does counting and ranking of the Top Cities, Regions and Languages work, and what does ‘normalized’ mean? For counting and ranking cities, Google Trends first looks at a sample of all Google searches to determine the cities from which we received the most searches for your first term. Then, for those top cities, Google Trends calculates the ratio of searches for your term coming from each city divided by total Google searches coming from the same city. The city ranking you see on the page and the bar charts alongside each city name both represent this ratio. When cities’ ratios are fairly close together, the corresponding bar graphs will be roughly the same length, and the exact ranking between these cities is less meaningful.

Essentially, all results from Google Trends are normalized. This means we’ve divided the sets of data by a common variable to cancel out the variable’s effect on the data and allow the underlying characteristics of the data sets to be compared. If we didn’t normalize the results, and instead displayed the absolute rankings of cities, they wouldn’t be all that interesting. For example, New York city would be the top city for many results because there are lots of searches from there.

Keep in mind that instead of measuring overall interest in a topic, Google Trends shows users’ propensity to search for that topic on Google on a relative basis. For example, just because a particular region isn’t on the Top Regions list for the term “haircut” doesn’t necessarily mean that people there have decided to stage a mass rebellion against society’s conventions. It could be that people in that region might not use Google to find a barber, use a different term when doing their searches, or simply search for so many other topics unrelated to haircuts that searches for “haircut” make up a very small portion of the search volume from that region when compared to other regions.

7. This tool makes search information public. What about my personal search data?You can rest assured your personal search data remains safe and private. Our graphs are based on aggregated data from millions of searches done on Google over time. And the results Google Trends displays are produced entirely by an automated formula. As an additional measure, Google Trends only returns results for terms that receive a significant amount of search traffic.

We understand and respect your concerns about your privacy, and we encourage you to learn more by reading our privacy policy.

8. How accurate and up-to-date is the information provided by Google Trends ? Google Trends is a Google Labs product, which means it’s still in its early stages of development. 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. dissertation based on this information. We’re now updating the information provided by Google Trends daily; Hot Trends is updated hourly.

9. When is it okay to use the information I find on Google Trends ? You’re free to use any of the information you find on Google Trends, but, before you do, please check out our Terms of Use. If you choose to use the information, please make sure to appropriately attribute it to Google.

10. When will this tool be available for my country or language? Currently, Google Trends is only available in English and Chinese. Hot Trends is only available in English. We hope to roll out Google Trends in other regions and languages in the future.

Search engine optimization or SEO is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks”, the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site’s relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site’s coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Other, more noticeable efforts may include adding unique content to a site, ensuring that content is easily indexed by search engine robots, and making the site more appealing to users. Another class of techniques, known as “Black hat” SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove their listings.

The initialism “SEO” can also refer to “search engine optimizers“, a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloguing the early Web. Initially, all a webmaster needed to do was submit a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a spider to “crawl” that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed. The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine’s own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, as well as any and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date.

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the earliest known use of the phrase “search engine optimization” was a spam message posted on Usenet on July 26, 1997.

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta-tags provided a guide to each page’s content. But using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, because some webmasters abused meta tags by including irrelevant keywords to artificially increase page impressions for their website and to increase their ad revenue. Cost per thousand impressions was at the time the common means of monetizing content websites. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent meta data in meta tags caused pages to rank for irrelevant searches, and fail to rank for relevant searches.Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors exclusively within a webmaster’s control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate.

While graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed a search engine called “backrub” that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links.PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Google headquarters in Buenos Aires, Argentina

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design. Off-page factors such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis were considered, as well as on-page factors, to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings. Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaining PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming.

To reduce the impact of link schemes, as of 2007, search engines consider a wide range of undisclosed factors for their ranking algorithms. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Live Search, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms.

Webmasters and search engines

By 1997 search engines recognized that some webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and even manipulating the page rankings in search results. Early search engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords.

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEOs. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers.

SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal profiled a company, Traffic Power, that allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients. Wired reported the same company sued blogger Aaron Wall for writing about the ban.Google’s Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients.

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization. Google has a Sitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information.

White hat versus black hat

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO.White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

An SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines’ guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see.

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical.

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking.

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines’ algorithms, or by a manual site review.

One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices.Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google’s list.

By Wikimedia Foundation, Inc