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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.

The importance of having a Sitemap made of your directory for Google cannot be under estimated. Google has evening given webmasters a dedicated tool to submit and manage your sitemaps that you submit to Google.

One of the best Sitemap generators on the market is GSiteCrawler with in Gl2 Design mind. So here is an overview for you to read and enjoy.

Tour of the GSiteCrawler

In this tour you’re going to generate a Google Sitemap file for your website. We will start by adding a new project, adjusting the settings, crawling your website, generating and uploading the sitemap file and finish by adding the sitemap file to your Google Sitemaps account.

To get to know the program it makes sense to generate the sitemap file for a smaller website (with less than 500 or so pages). Larger wegsites will take longer to crawl - and for a first view it is often easier to play with something smaller, even if it isn’t your own website.

Adding a new website / project to the GSiteCrawler

In order to create a sitemap file, you will need to add your website as a new project. The easiest way is to use the wizard by choosing ‘Add new project’ in the top toolbar.

The New Site Wizard

The first step in the wizard is for you to enter your websites address. (If you have the address in the clipboard, it will automatically be filled out.) Enter the address as you would in a browser, remember to include the “http://” in front (or “https://”). You will need to add a trailing slash (”/”) so that the name of the folder is identifyable (no filesnames).

The program automatically creates a name for the project (below) based on your address - you can of course change this as you desire.

Before the next step the programm will do a quick test of your website, to make sure it is reachable and to check what kind of server you are using. This might take a short while. (You can skip this step if you desire, just check the box below the project name.)

General Site options in the Wizard

Here we can now adjust most of the main settings for your website. Based on the server check, it will automatically suggest either case-sensitive or non-case-sensitive URLs. By default it will add a filter to remove any session-ID parameters it recognizes, it will add the known HTML file type extensions and add all other recognizable, indexable files to the sitemap as well (images, videos, office-files and other files). Feel free to play with these settings or just leave them in their default settings to start with.

Specifying FTP settings for an automatic upload

If you want the GSiteCrawler to automatically upload your sitemap file, you can specify your servers FTP information. It needs the usual settings, server name, user name, password, folder name, etc. You can test the connection to see if it can connect to the server.

You can choose between the standard XML file or the XML.GZ file to be uploaded. The XML.GZ file is just a compressed version of your XML file, so you might save some time by just uploading that. Google will take either one. If you have a larger site with more than 40′000 URLs you should use the .XML.GZ version (it is required for “Sitemap-Index” files).

Note: You can always upload the sitemap file manually or add it to your web-publisher program for a later upload.

Finishing up - starting the crawlers

The next step sets the rest of the GSiteCrawler up. You will generally want to import your robots.txt file (to make sure the crawler doesn’t go where it shouldn’t), check for a custom ‘file-not-found’ page (that doesn’t return error code 404) and import a list of URLs already indexed with Google for this site (to get the crawler started). With ‘Scan your website now’ it will start crawling your site as soon as you continue, with ‘Wait for scan to complete and upload file’ it will automatically upload your sitemap file once it’s done (of course this is only possible if you have specified the correct FTP settings).

Crawling, crawling, crawling …

After the last step in the wizard (and if you told it to do so), it will start crawling your website. Depending on the size of your website, this might take some time. The speed it takes is dependant on many factors…

The numbers for the queue are updated regularly to reflect the current known information (of course if a site is only half-crawled, the program will only know about half of the URLs, so it can’t judge how much is still unknown). Aborted URLs are shown in the bottom table - these can be URLs that are either broken links or that were mistakenly interpreted as links.

You can pause the crawler at any time, close the program and restart later. If you want to abort a crawl, you should pause the crawlers, wait until they are empty and then clear the queue (otherwise it will just clear the waiting list but add any URLs found in the running crawlers).

Automatically uploading the sitemap file via FTP

Once the crawlers are done, and if you specified to do so in the settings, the program will automatically generate a Google Sitemap file and upload it to your server.

If you did not specify to do this, you can just click on the ‘Generate’ button in the top toolbar to generate the Google Sitemap file. You can then upload the sitemap file manually or with a tool of your choice (eg Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc.).

Checking your Google Sitemap file

Let’s just check the sitemap file before we submit it to Google. To do that, you can just enter the URL to your sitemap file in a browser (this doesn’t seem to work with Opera 8, though). It should display similar to the one here. The layout comes from a ’stylesheet’ which just makes the XML data look nicer. You can look at the real data beneath by using the browser function ‘view source’ which will give you something machine-readable like the image below. You should not change anything in the sitemap file itself - at least until you are certain that you know what you are doing.

Next step: Submitting your sitemap file to your Google Sitemap account and your done. Make sure that you keep your sitemap up to date and check that it has no errors in it. Tip is sometime Google will have a hick up and will not except a sitemap even though the week before it did so it is important to check.

Interested then visit you can currently download the GSiteCrawler for free >> Download

Author - GL2 Design team taken from GSiteCrawler