5 Trends Tracked by Google Inc (GOOG)

Curious what trends are tracked by Google? While Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) is mostly famous for its search engine Google.com, it also offers a variety of services like Gmail, Google News, Google Finance, Google Maps. At the same time the company is engaged in a variety of projects like Google Glass, or Self-driving cars.

Photo Credit: West McGowan

But let’s get back to the search engine. Its widespread popularity even created the verb “to Google” which became a synonym for Internet search. But aside from that, a more serious issue produced by Google’s recognition as #1 search engine resulted in the development of a whole area of studies, “Search Engine Optimization”, which features Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s competitors on the field (Yahoo!, Bing, etc.).

One of the features of Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG)’s search engine, which is slowly but confidently gains popularity is Google Trends. Google Trends is actually a feature based on Google search, which allows users to see how often a particular term is searched by other users. It also has some useful functions which allow users to narrow the data by region, language, time period, etc.

Google Trends also offers the Hot Trends feature which shows 20 most popular search terms over the past hour in the United States. The feature provides a graph of the search volume for each of these terms, which shows the data over the past 24 hours.

So, as you can see, Google Trends is a very useful tool, it provides information of the most popular topics and allow users to monitor the evolution of a particular topic. For example, a user can find Cities, Actors, Movies that have been most searched. And as Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) at the end of every year releases a video about most searched terms of that particular year, Google Trends provides the same data but more updated more often.

With this in mind, we have picked a couple of trends tracked by Google Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) that are worth knowing about. One of them is Google Flu Trends, which by analyzing the search data can provide the activity and spread of the flu disease. Google also has trends for other diseases (we included another one in our list).

Without any further ado, let’s take a look at the list of Google’s top trend programs:

Search Phrases

Search Phrases is a trend which reveals data about most popular search terms, from a variety of topics like Movies, Cars, Actors, Singers, etc.

Dengue Trends

Dengue Trends tracks the activity of dengue disease in the world. It summarizes data from particular search terms and displays on the map the activity of the disease in the world.

Ngram Viewer

Google Ngram Viewer shows the density of different phrases in Google’s  sample books. The user can enter different parameters for its search, like years, or particular categories of books.

Youtube Trends

This a relatively recent trend, which displays data related to the popularity of Youtube videos (Youtube platform is owned by Google) over the U.S. Data can be divided by gender of viewers, for example.

Flu Trends

Flu is one of the most common diseases in the world. Google knows it and helps Internet users to track the spread of this disease in particular countries. The way it works is the same as in the aforementioned Dengue Trends, data about the spread of the illness is gathered based on the popularity of particular search-terms.