Google Trends today launched Top Charts, a monthly view (US-only for the time being) of the top searches on Google, broken down by some broad categories—like books, cars, athletes, and many more. Of interest to bookish folk might be:
Trends allows you to search the vast store of data that is the Google Search box to get insights into what the general public thinks is interesting, or important. I’m not sure that you can do much “real” research from these charts, but they are interesting—Stephen King was trending higher than Karl Marx in April, for example. If you haven’t had a look at Google Trends yet, it is worth spending a little time with. At BookNet, we’ve used this data recently to do some analysis of E-Reading Search Trends in Canada.
Here are a few good sources of information on how you might leverage Google Trends data for your business:
Searches for the terms “ebooks,” “ebook” and “ereader” in Canada for the last 12 months:
