Search insights

Most searched new year’s resolutions

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 11:18:50 +0000

Recently, I’ve noticed a group of search terms that can be classified as ‘self improvement’ type searches. For instance, whilst looking into what languages people wanted to learn online, I noticed that pretty much all of them had a surge of interest in the first week of the new year.

I decided to look at all of these searches together to see what the overall most searched for new year’s resolution was and if this corresponds to any other data.

I grouped the ‘self improvement’ searches together into 5 categories…

and then popped them into Google insights for search…

**Yellow = Job** **Green = Money** **Blue = Weight** **Purple = Gym** **Red = Learn**

(I did include ‘volunteer’ as a group and searches did peak in January for this term however the number of people searching for it was so low, you could barely make it out on the chart).

You can see they all have peaks in January but what is interesting here is the effects of the recession, first pointed out to me by www.nicholine.com in her paper looking at the recessions effect on search behaviour.

If you notice every year, searches including the term ‘jobs’ not only had the biggest overall volume but also the biggest difference in volume between the year as a whole and the spike in January however last year this appeared to drop off dramatically and almost get overtaken for the first time by ‘money’ searches…

**yellow = searches for ‘jobs’** and **green = searches for ‘money’**

My interpretation of this is that fewer people were seeking to change career in the new year last year, looking to hold on to what they had during a gloomy outlook whilst more people were interested in ‘money’ whether that was saving, not spending or earning.

Steady learning and rising weight

People searching to learn a new language or skill in the new year have remained steady since 2004 and yet people looking to lose weight in the new year have slowly climbed in a very consistent way since 2004 with last year being a particularly high peak, coinciding with the relatively high number of increased ‘gym’ searches.

How they compare

It’s difficult to find reliable data online however this report from Marketing Charts seems to back up our findings whereas this from bing suggests fitness is first (although they don’t mention whether or not they actually looked at any finance related data.

US searches for new years resolutions

All the above data was looking at UK searches however if you compare them to searches in the US, you can see that weight is a much (weightier) concern…

Again, **Yellow = Job** **Green = Money** **Blue = Weight** **Purple = Gym** **Red = Learn**

Interesting to see also in this case that whilst searches for ‘weight’ inc weight loss etc are a lot higher than the UK, searches for the gym are actually a lot smaller comparatively – do you want to tell them or shall I?

I love getting and answering questions so feel free to comment using the form below.

Why are cupcakes so popular?

Duncan Bloor — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 16:14:41 +0000

Inspired by the wheel of hunger visualisation from the other week I started to look into food trends around the world with the ultimate aim of making a “World food trends” visual in the near future.

Along the way I stumbled across a beautiful demonstration of how Google insights for search can show a trend sweeping the globe.

The video below shows searches for cupcakes from 2004 to the present day (The darker blue the country gets, the more popular cupcakes searches are). I like to think you could probably substitute ‘cupcake’ for ‘American fad’.

And this is what happened where it all started, in America. Note, California starts the trend swiftly followed by those North East regions.

And here is the global search demand for cupcakes mapped out since 2004. Note all of the peaks occurring in the early years in October (Halloween?) and now we have peaks in February and March too.

Global searches for cupcakes since 2004

Cupcake sites I came across during my research

10 Ways to Decorate With Cupcakes (casasugar.com)
That’s What Friends are For: Cupcake Review (planetpookie.com)
Pumpkin Cupcakes with Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Icing (familyof7.wordpress.com)
Babycakes Friday: Chocolate Cupcakes (yesiwantcake.com)

Spiders and Conkers

Duncan Bloor — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 16:00:27 +0000

My wife and I had a debate last night on the back of me having to catch and set free 4 massive house spiders over the course of two weeks. My twitter stream was also full of people mentioning the fact that they’d seen huge spiders and the debate we had was around whether or not we should go out and gather some conkers!

My opinion is that the ability of conkers to deter spiders is an old myth. But why would people think they had any effect in the first place?

Using what people search for on the internet provides compelling evidence…

Google searches for 'spiders' since 2004

So every year people search for spiders around the same time (May – June and then a big peak in September). This years peak is particularly high, reflecting the unseasonably warm weather we’ve had in the UK which is encouraging spiders to come out and find mates.

So far so good, but what about the conkers? Well…

The red line represents searches for ‘conkers’ and at first glance there is indeed a correlation between the two search terms but take a closer look….

And you can see that as searches for conkers are peaking, the spiders are declining i.e. By the time of year that conkers fall to the ground comes around, spiders naturally stop mating and so are seen less.

So it’s easy to see why people would have thought that the conkers they had brought into their houses were keeping the spiders away, confusing correlation with causation and hence the birth of an old wives tale.

Note: Despite the above evidence, we’re still going out to try and find some conkers tonight.

Spiders invade – this means war! (alisonharmer.wordpress.com)

The wheel of hunger

Duncan Bloor — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:46:51 +0000

(click image to enlarge)

Big thanks to Adam Hinks for his help in making this data look magnificent and to James Webb for his invaluable feedback and direction. Want to see other ways search engine data can be made awesome?

Background

Our brains process 400 billion bits of information every second

Sounds like a lot doesn’t it? Well it is, but fortunately we only ‘experience’ around 2,000 bits of this

This filtering enables us as human beings to make decisions based upon the data we receive. Without it, we’d be paralysed by the overwhelming possibilities of everything we see, touch, hear, store, smell and sense

In much the same way, when we look at what people are searching for online, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by rows upon rows of search terms, dates and volumes (even if it ‘only’ amounts to less than a million rows)

For someone looking at the data all day with advanced spreadsheet skills and tools it can be a little easier but we can’t all be data ninja’s and nor would we want to be

That’s why the visualisation above was created. It takes a mass of data around what people search for online and filters it down through stages in order to answer the important question for anyone interested in creating content around food ‘what should we be talking about / linking to / sharing / discussing / creating / revamping?’

The filter process:

What people search for

(look at a big dataset of search terms that send traffic to over 3,000 recipe websites, in this case Hitwise)

What (UK) people search for around food

(restrict data to only those searches that ended up visiting a food related website)

What (UK) people search for around food every month

(Download the data on a month by month basis)

The most trending searches around food every month

(Compare this each months data to the previous months data and chart those searches that have risen the most in volume. This is to make sure that we’re looking at search terms that are ‘big’ due to the month and not just those that are ‘big’ all year round).

What’s the point?

In creating this visualisation we’ve hopefully made something that helps us better connect to our audiences.

As every marketer knows, messages need to be delivered to the right people at the right time in the right place, using their language. In refining it to just the top twenty trending search terms for each month we’ve hopefully made something that will not just make sense but will be used to make a difference.

Big thanks to Adam Hinks for his help in making this data look magnificent and to James Webb for his invaluable feedback and direction.

You can download the infographic in PDF format here BBC_Food_Infographic_v5

Most other search visualisations from this site are here

Please take a while to comment below.

The most asked questions (searchinsights.wordpress.com)
Search engine data visualisations (searchinsights.wordpress.com)
What do people search for? Health (searchinsights.wordpress.com)
Our thirst for knowledge (searchinsights.wordpress.com)
Flight search infographic: New York accounts for 34% of USA flight searches (weblogs.hitwise.com)

Search engine data visualisations

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 11:12:29 +0000

I’ve decided I need a single place to put all of the search engine data visuals that I’ve been working on.

The visuals are made up of thousands of actual queries put into search engines by UK users over the course of a year. This gives us an idea of ‘search demand’ which can/may/should equal actual, offline demand for a topic.

Feel free to republish however please link to this blog and also to James Webb who helped to create them.

They can be downloaded as PDF’s at the bottom of this page.

Overall

Gardening

Health

Science

Nature

History

Questions

Download as PDF

Click the links below to open the visuals in PDF format for better quality printing / viewing.

The most asked questions on Google

Duncan Bloor — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 10:24:41 +0000

Despite the demise of Ask Jeeves, many people still search the internet using questions. I like these people as it’s easy to tell what the intent behind a search is. Also, when a search is phrased as a question e.g. If someone searches for ‘how big is the moon?’ then we can make a pretty good guess as to the information they’re after and can make content that satisfies that demand however if someone just types ‘big moon’ they may want to know the size of the moon but equally they could just want to know what makes a moon appear big in the night sky.

I’ve been doing a little digging around using Hitwise data to find out what are the most asked questions online and what percentage of total searches are questions (does it vary from someone looking for recipes to someone looking for science information). I used Hitwise data and my attempt at visualising all of this is below. (click on the image to make it bigger).

The intent behind these searches is crystal clear

Using search engine data to shape and create online content (searchinsights.wordpress.com)
Jeeves Retires (firstrate.co.nz)
The Huge Untapped Potential of Q&A Content for SEO (seomoz.org)
Study Looks at Searcher Verbosity, Ask “Wins” (searchenginewatch.com)
http://sp.ask.com/2009/topquestions.html (Top questions of 2009 – Ask)

Are infographics becoming infoGRAPHICS?

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 11:58:36 +0000

‘A picture paints a thousand words’ so the saying goes and that, in a nutshell, is the power and magic of the infographic. However with the recent rise in the popularity of them, are we starting to lose the plot? Is style winning over substance?

Part of the definition of an infographic is that “graphics present complex information quickly and clearly” – Wiki. They’ve been used for centuries to convey complex data in order to achieve noble ambitions, for example the Florence Nightingale ‘infographic’ below that greatly increased peoples chances of surviving hospital admissions.

And yet lately I’ve noticed more and more infographics (let’s call them infoGRAPHICS) that, when you take away the froth, you’re left with not a great deal of coffee. Even worse, in some cases they’re being used simply as a means of corporate or government propaganda, bending the truth to unimaginable proportions ”Ooooh don’t the little unemployed people in this graph look so cute and, er small”

The examples below are tongue in cheek but represent a real problem.

The culprits

How much can you trust a bearded man?

To be fair, the author does note that this is based on no scientific evidence whatsoever and in its defence it’s funny but it’s a reflection on the people at visual.ly that they actually have this on their homepage.

The ‘Conversation prism’

I’ve seen this one a few times. Rolled out at presentations by people in thick black rimmed glasses and stripey shirts. No one in the audience understands it. The person in the stripey shirt doesn’t even understand it but everyone thinks ‘Oooh pretty colours and lots of social networks that I have the vague feeling I should know about but don’t’. Guy in stripey shirt likes the impact it has on an audience, the presumption is that he must know what this wheel means and therefore he should be listened to. It’s the ultimate emporer’s new clothes.

For all the added useful insight it brings to an audience, the ‘conversation prism’ (which isn’t even a prism by the way) may as well just look like this:

Social networks people are actually on Who uses them? Advertise on?

facebook Your mum, weirdo’s No way

twitter People you’re actually interested in, pornbots No way

linkedin Your boss, recruitment consultants No way

Spoofographic

Now I’m not saying I’m a good designer, or even a designer but whenever I have to design, I try to make sure it’s necessary and that the picture shows a true view of the data that needs to be conveyed (so for example the London underground map doesn’t need to be ‘to scale’ because that’s not what it’s conveying, the important information is the stops, orientation and interchanges which it conveys truthfully). I may not get this right all of the time but it’s what I work towards and I suspect many people, companies and organisations don’t.

At the moment we’re in a honeymoon period where the validity of these infographics isn’t really being checked out by the end user however this honeymoon period will end and when it does it’s likely that just a few infoGRAPHICS will tarnish much of the good work going into this area.

I suppose, ironically, the best way to sum up this post is with an infographic of its own. The utterly brilliant spoof from thinkbrilliant.com.

You may also want to read another post on this blog about the most popular questions asked on search engines.

What do people search for? Health

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 29 Jul 2011 14:00:55 +0000

Last weeks post looked at what people searched for in seven areas: Health, Food, Nature, Gardening, History, Religion and Science.

This week we’ll drill down into one of those areas, Health.

The categories here aren’t comprehensive. The data editor (me) has simply taken keywords of interest or volume and grouped them together under a name i.e. Weight looks at all the search terms in our data that contain BMI, weight, obesity etc.

I thought that looking at the terms that have grown or shrunk year on year (risers and fallers) was interesting for health. Note depression is falling hugely (see my other post on searches around depression)

Also of interest is the fact that a larger number of people ask questions related to health when searching i.e. They search for ‘What are the symptoms of’ rather than ‘symptoms of’ is this because they’re older?

The pie chart shows the volume of searches relative to the other categories.

Comments are welcome unless you’re trying to sell Viagra (in which case just email me directly).

All data sourced from Hitwise

See all of the data visualisations here

Related articles

Using search engine data to shape and create online content (searchinsights.wordpress.com)

Our thirst for knowledge

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:36:07 +0000

I’ve recently been working on trying to map out people’s appetite for knowledge online and the BBC’s ‘voice’ within each topic with James Webb. In order to do this I grouped hundreds of websites into different categories and measured the volume of traffic going to each of those genres over the course of a year using Experian Hitwise. I then validated these figures by comparing the results with actual visitor numbers to the BBC websites.

As far as I’m aware this kind of work hasn’t been carried out before but I’d be grateful if anyone could point out similar studies and how this one compares? If you click on the image below it will give you a better view.

Data sourced from Experian Hitwise

Notes: This is a work in progress. At present, I think that the history category is underrepresented and the outer pie charts in section 1 aren’t to scale.

See all of the data visualisations here

See more on visualising search data

Why do we need help?

Duncan Bloor — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 14:14:51 +0000

Around 5,000,000 people search for help every month in the UK, but what do they want help with? I analysed the words people typed into Google, Bing etc to see how often certain words were used. Here are the top 1,500 from last month (the more popular a word, the bigger it is).

See all of the data visualisations here

Thanks to wordle.org