Google Trends Are Now More Intelligent
Categories - Featured, News, SEO
Google recently announced an update to Google Trends that will make it easier to explore and compare trending topics and entities. It can now compare trending topics based on the type of entity, making it easier to measure the trending interest of the topic that actually matters to you. For instance, Google provides different data for the search query “rice” depending on whether or not the user intended to search for Rice (Cereal) or Rice (University).
In an earlier blog post, David Carrillo, Manager of Earned Media, highlighted the benefits of using Google Trends as a key tool for generating ideas for content. The new capabilities of Google Trends not only provide more insight into trending topics but also echo other major changes that Google has undergone throughout 2013. David adds:
“It’s interesting because this update to Google Trends gives better data for known entities, presumably through the advancements made with the Knowledge Graph and Hummingbird, which in theory allows marketers to make better decisions in cases where there’s some ambiguity of words with multiple meanings. I don’t think there will be a huge impact on content generation as a whole, but it is important in the general sense because it’s another indicator that Google has and will continue to do a better job of understanding the context of user queries.
It now knows, at least more than it did a few years ago, how many people are looking for information on technology products when searching for “windows” as opposed to information about the opening in a structure or vehicle.
Google Trends currently has 700,000 unique topics in its publicly available dataset—which means it has a lot more data behind the scenes—and this number will only continue to grow. As we’ve been saying about nearly every Google update these days, if you’re writing good content and developing a strong brand, you have nothing to worry about.
If you’re doing lazy SEO, it’s only going to get harder to penetrate the SERPs.”
Google is increasingly finding ways to associate entities with particular topics, allowing the search engine to more intelligently infer a user’s intent based on a simple search query. With Google Trends, the benefits are passed on to marketers, who can harness the data to stay on top of what is current and trending.
