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Saturday, April 12, 2003
Lycos 50 Not the Only Search Engine Spy in Town
The other day, Chris Sherman of Search Day took a look at the Lycos 50, the list of the 50-most-searched phrases on Lycos for the week, and explained how marketers and other curious types might use the information to predict trends. It was a good piece, but neglected to mention that Lycos has company in this space. Yahoo has a similar feature called Yahoo Buzz, and Google has its Zeitgeist.
Yahoo one-ups Lycos by updating their list every day, so the information is a bit more real time. Plus Yahoo presents their buzz scores by category, such as Music, Sports and Television, but also tracks the overall buzz scores for all categories combined.
It's interesting to see what people are searching about, but in general, if you follow the news, it's rather obvious what's on people's minds!
Google calls their feature "Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google." I'd say that theirs represents a great deal more searches than Lycos' and Yahoo's, since Google is used by so many more people. But in general, if you want to know what people want to know about, any one of these will do the trick.
For marketers, this information is pure gold. It's like having a focus group, but with all the focus and none of the group!
Posted by
Cory Kleinschmidt
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