Say hello to 'œGoogle Trends For Websites'

William Atkins
Sunday, 22 June 2008 22:37

Your IT - Home IT

Search Internet company Google has just introduced “Google Trends For Websites,” which allows users to look at and compare traffic data from different websites around the world.

Based on its Google Trends, which was begun about two years ago, users of "Google Trends For Websites" can check out specific domains (URLs) and compare traffic information of many domains.

It estimates the amount of unique visitors that the site has received over time, and then charts the results.

Some of the things provided by GTFW is daily traffic statistics of websites and comparison of up to five websites at any given moment using charts and bar graphs.

Google says, “… 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.”

In addition, TGFW also allows users to see how popular websites (“Hot Trends”) are in different countries and regions of the world. It will provide you with the search terms people have used to get to a particular website you input into the GTFW system.

Google says, “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.”

The new service by Google should be popular with people who are interested in finding how people are getting to their personal or professional website, say by keywords.

Google announces, however, that to get the full benefit of Trend For Websites, the user must be logged into a Google account.

Google will be competing against such traffic data service websites as Alexa, Compete, Hitwise, comScore, and others.

Google Trend For Websites hopes to improve on the existing traffic data service companies already in existence. It is collecting its data differently than the other traffic service companies.

See the next page for more information on the process that Google takes to collect its data on its Trends For Websites.