One of my favorite offerings by Google after Google Search, Gmail, Picasa, iGoogle, GTalk, Maps, etc.. (Though I love YouTube and Earth… you don’t see them on the list because I don’t consider them as Google’s inventions) is Google Trends!!

Google Trends is one of the best tools for SEO’s, Advertisers, Market researchers, etc.. Google started of with Google Trends for US and then extended it to Google trends for India, later they also released Trends for Music, however, music trends was withdrawn after a while but Google keyword trends continued to grow both in popularity and usage.

Google has now released a new tool called Google Insights for Search which lets you drill into a category of your interest and see what are users are searching for the most (Top Keywords), It offers top keywords by region and category or by time period.

This information is very useful for people involved any type of keyword based research. Google Insights lets you search based on three different criteria…

1. Search terms: You can search for a specific search term e.g. Movies and select your filters in terms of “Location” “Time Period” and “Category”. This search shows Top regions searching for the keyword “Movies” in the last 30 days in the entertainment category. It also shows “Top Searches” and Rising searches.

   You can also compare two keywords by using the feature “Add search term”.

   

   Google Insights Search Term Example

2. Locations: This search criteria offers drill down in terms of Region and Sub-region, e.g India, Andhra Pradesh. Data can be filtered in terms of “Keyword”, “Time Period” and “Categories”.

   This search shows data from region selected and all its sub-regions. Other similar information you will find on the report is “Top Searches” and Rising Searches.

   

   Google Insights Location Search Example

3. Time Ranges:  Here you can select the time range you want to see the information from. Select the time range and the Filters (Keyword, Region & Sub-region and Categories). This is just another view of the information you will see using the other two criteria’s.
   

   
   Google Insights Time Ranges Example

This not only opens very useful information to the world but also helps people come up with more meaningful and lazer targeted trends and patterns.

Resource Links:

• Google Insights
• Google Trends on Wikipedia
• Google Insight Support