Metafluence

Can you imagine the backside of Google?

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at the Google Zeitgeist before, but it’s a pretty cool page. Every year Google publishes a year-end report of trends in search terms that resulted from occurrences that year. In 2005, for example, the top searches were:

1. Janet Jackson
2. Hurricane Katrina
3. tsunami
4. xbox 360
5. Brad Pitt
6. Michael Jackson
7. American Idol
8. Britney Spears
9. Angelina Jolie
10. Harry Potter

That was two years ago now, but those feel pretty much like the largest occurrences in the news that year. Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt starting having an affair. Jennifer Anniston didn’t make the top ten. Brad Pitt was more popular than Angelina. Those are some story telling numbers. Being able to look back at a year’s major milestones from Google’s search data is pretty powerful. Imagine if you could see those numbers in real time? What things Google must know about popularity and points of interest. Here’s just a few things my small mind can imagine:

Ad supported content

If you know what is popular to the majority, you can craft your messages to play off of public perception. If a search term suddenly started spiking in popularity, you’d know to write something about it. You could even make determinations about what angle to take with your story. For example, if you know Brad has more interest than Angelina and she has more interest than Jennifer you’d know you could focus on Brad and shun Jennifer. You could also try a poor Jennifer story. Either way, you’d have an advantage to covering popular topics. And, popular topics generate more traffic. And, more traffic equates to more money in the ad supported content world.

Affiliates

You probably didn’t need Google to figure out that the XBox 360 was a hot product, but what if there are some surprise products in there? Then you could target web pages to pull in searchers for popular products. You’d also be able to discover additional information about the products from people adding more description keywords to a search for the product, such as “cheap xbox 360″ or “xbox 360 mods”. That kind of data would allow you to focus your sales pitch toward the largest customer base.

Politics

Man, if you could see what people are searching for around political issues, and then what they clicked on, it would be much easier to sway public opinion or align one’s self with it. Again referencing the 2005 Zeitgest, Google recorded a huge spike in searches for “London bombings” on July 7th, which is of course the day an act of terror killed more than 50 Londoners. If you wanted to know what people knew of the event, Google recorded that people clicked on the BBC article four times more than CNN’s and 10 times more than Al Jazeera’s. And if you think that political machines can’t influence public perception, then take a look at the data pattern for the key phrase “weapons of mass destruction”. The other side of the Google search box holds a wealth of political knowledge that the human race has never seen before.

Investing

Some of the popular keywords that are rising are company names. Some of the searches for those company names also include additional keywords that tell stories. That data could easily be leveraged to inform investing strategies—particularly attractive to day trading.

Those are just a few of the things I can think of to do with the information. I’m sure there are many more admirable things we can do with Google’s valuable data. I wonder who has access to that information? What kind of national security issues does that info possess? I have to imagine at least a small group at the top of the Google food chain have figured out ways to leverage the unbelievably valuable information available to them.

They have thrown us a bone publishing a 100 keyword list ranked in popularity called Hot Trends. Check it out, perhaps it could help you in some way.