Just in case you missed it Google had a press day yesterday where they announced Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, Google Notebook (which hasn’t been released yet, but most folks are guessing this is based on Writely and Google Trends. Out all these the one I’m most interested in is Google Trends.
Traditionally Google digests information and only rarely offers ways for the public to view details about information it has collected. With the release of Google Trends we finally get a chance to see what people have been looking for. You can compare search terms and narrow it down by time and region. Unfortunately their graphs don’t expose raw numbers, only the relative number of searches over time. Although the United States is included in the region search results, you can can’t filter on it. Despite these short comings I think Trends will be a hit and likely spawn a whole new round of Google games.
The obvious use of Trends is to compare what people are looking for related products. An example of this would be intel vs. amd or dell vs. hp. Another trend to look at is how new product search compares to their replacements, like powerbook vs macbook.
One thing to be careful of is that Google will start returning 403 Forbidden (HTTP status codes) if you attempt searches in rapid succession. I think this is rather lame, especially given the excuse they provide:
We're sorry...
... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a
computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we
can't process your request right now.
We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again
soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network
has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware
remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and
other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you
again on Google.
Given Google’s failure to prepare for previous product launches (remember how long Google Pages and Google Analytics were down after their initial debut?) this may be their way of preventing Google Trends from being crushed after only being available for one day. Is Google really concerned about people writing viruses that infect systems with the purpose of being able to issue a large number of queries to Google Trends? If so why aren’t they doing the same thing for their home page? Time to call Google out, while Trends is cool, their effort to “protect … users” is lame.