Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 3. Graph Google Results over Time

Use Google as a trend watcher .

As of November 2004, Google's
index contains a whopping eight billion pages
and growing. And it doesn't just record pages;
it's filled with news and events, commentary and
discussion, changes and trends. You might think of Google as a mirror
that we hold up to the Web that approximates how we define and
represent ourselves and our world.

It should come as no surprise, then, that people spend an awful lot
of time and energy watching Google results in an attempt to spot
emerging topics and track trends. If you've been
tapped to do this for your company, product, project, or service,
G-Metrics
(http://g-metrics.com) might be
right up your alley. G-Metrics measures the occurrence of a keyword
or set of keywords defined by you across timecomplete with
graphs.

Register with G-Metrics (registration requires only your name and
email address) for a login key. Once logged in, you can set queries,
alter, remove, or review your queries and the results
they've captured. Figure 1-10 shows
my current watchlist, each query sporting a result count and
percentage change over time.

Click a query for a trend graph from the time you added the search,
counts for the past seven days, and Google's current
top 10 results for that query, as shown in Figure 1-11.

We also show you how to track result counts over time [Hack #3] ,
but G-Metrics takes this further, allowing you to monitor trends
without a lot of legwork; your queries are "set it
and forget it." You can even subscribe to an RSS
feed of the results of any one of your queries. Sure, you could set
up Google Alerts [Hack #59] , feed the numbers into a spreadsheet, and do the graphing
yourselfbut why?