CyberNotes: Analyzing Competitors with Google Trends

Weekend Website

Google Trends has proved to be a great way to see what’s hot and what’s not in Google searches. There’s a lot you can learn, particularly with their “Hot Trends” which is compiled daily. It’s also proved to be a great way to analyze search trends as I’ve done today with some of the more popular technology competitors. There’s nothing earth shattering about what I’ve found, but it’s interesting to see who comes out on top as far as searches go.

You’ll notice “markers” on the graphs which correlated with a news article. Often times if there are big spikes where these letter markers are located, it tells us that whatever was in the news that day caused the spike in searches. For example, on the graph showing Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs, the spike that occurred at marker “F” was when the “Fake Steve” jobs was revealed.

Finally, keep in mind that these are search trends based upon Google searches.

–Apple vs. Microsoft–

–iPhone vs. BlackBerry–

–Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs–

–HP vs. Dell–

–MySpace vs. Facebook–

As expected, we see Facebook steadily climbing North!

–Flickr vs. Picasa–

I wasn’t expecting Flickr and Picasa to align as closely as they do. Both have seen a pretty decent climb in searches over the last month or two as well.

–iPod vs. Zune–

Is it just me, or is the Zune flat-lining?

–Xbox 360 vs. PS3 vs. Wii–

We know that the Wii is currently the best selling console, so it makes sense that there are more searches for the term “Wii” than there are for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

–Twitter vs. Jaiku vs. Pownce–

–Google vs. MSN vs. Yahoo–

Yahoo still leads the way here, although Google is getting close…

–IE vs.Safari vs. Firefox–

Wow, Firefox seems to be popular amongst searches, doesn’t it? I was going to include Opera here, but Google pulled in trends for opera singers, not exclusively the browser.

–Windows vs. Mac vs. Linux–

–Hotmail vs. Gmail vs. Yahoo Mail–

–Gizmodo vs. Engadget vs. Lifehacker–

While Lifehacker certainly wouldn’t be considered a competitor of Gizmodo or Engadget, it’s still a high-traffic blog that I thought would be interesting to compare against other high-traffic blogs.

–Spiderman vs. Batman–

Just for fun Can you tell when Spiderman 3 came out?

–Wrapping it up–

While none of these graphs provide any information we didn’t already know, it’s interesting to see how some of the most popular technology topics compare against others. If you’d like to do your own comparisons, just go to www.google.com/trends and enter in the topics you’d like to compare separated by a comma.  You can enter in up to five different topics. There’s a lot you can learn about what people are searching for, especially with the “hot trends.”

 This is just one of the hundreds of CyberNotes we have done. You can find more of them by visiting our CyberNotes category, or by subscribing to our CyberNotes feed. We also have a full feed available if you want to receive all of our articles in your reader!

Tags: CyberNotes, Google, Web Sites, Comparison

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