An excellent article in the NY Times today about John Battelle’s term "Database of Intentions" as a reference to Online Clickstream Analysis of Google Searches.  I met John Battelle a couple of times and read his book.  The awareness of the article on Google Trends came to me, in fact, from Google Alerts (I have one on "blog Analysis tools" - it flagged this article by David LeonHardt and notified me by email).

The fact is that Google Trends is still not that good - it has a long way to go. First of all, Google Trends has been out a couple of months (maybe 3) but the article says it’s been out a couple of weeks (maybe it was written earlier); I think the author should have checked that first.  Also, the article talks about a search on "sex" being highest in Elmherst, Ill but does not explain how he got that search (he should have had a link to the query in Google Trends in the article).

"Thanks to Google Trends, the mayor of Elmhurst, Ill., a Chicago suburb, has had to explain why his city devotes more of its Web searches to "sex" than any other in the United States (because it doesn’t have strip clubs or pornography shops, he gamely told The Chicago Sun-Times).

I was not able to find the same thing - whenever you talk about Trends -and you are using a free online tool like Google Trends - what does hurt to put the query in a hyperlink like I’m doing right now? 

And futher on:

"YOU can see, for example, that the volume of Google searches would have done an excellent job predicting this year’s "American Idol," with Taylor Hicks (the champion) being searched more often than Katharine McPhee (second place), who in turn was searched more often than Elliot Yamin (third place). Then you can compare Hillary Clinton and Al Gore and discover that she was more popular than he for almost all of the last two years, until he surged past her in April and stayed there".

I wrote a lot about that, but I felt I got better information at of Microsoft AdCenter than Google Trends (but the products are different and for some things Google Trends gives you more flexability and world information - while AdCenter is mainly the US only at this time).

Here’s a search on Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, John Edwards (JRE) which shows both the strengths and weaknesses of Google Trends - strenghs in that the timelines are tied to news stories in Google News. On the other hand, I liked what I get out of BlogPulse better than Google Trends, in this case.  I also wrote a lot about this in several recent posts such as John Edwards Buzz from Gnomedex, John Edwards - JRE Update Buzz from Gnomedex, Smartmobbing the next US elections and even FireWork Shows and Buzz on the 4th of July.

Further, there are aspects of AdCenter that Google Trends does not even attempt to touch on, such as GeoDemographics, Wealth and Age / Sex of Searchers.  For example, a chart of searchers for Online Tattoos would be impossible to come up in Google Trends (see below).

I created this as part of a competitive analysis of a online Tattoo Site - Google Trends could not attempt, at this time, to create anything close to this kind of mashup.  Nor can Trends breakdown a Keyword based on Demographic group - but with AdCenter- you can pull that data out of it (manually at this time).

"When these tools get good enough, you can see how the business of marketing may start to change. As soon as a company begins an advertising campaign, it will be able to get feedback from an enormous online focus group and then tweak its message accordingly."

Thank God! And I hope Madison Avenue comes knocking on my door - because I probably know more about how to pull this data out of Search Engines and give it meaning than anyone else - I certainly have written enough about it on Webmetricsguru.com since I started this blog.

"Hal R. Varian, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, who advises Google, predicts that online metrics like this one have put Madison Avenue on the verge of a quantitative revolution, similar to the one Wall Street went through in the 1970’s when it began parsing market data much more finely. "People have hunches, people have prejudices, people have ideas," said Mr. Varian, who also writes for this newspaper about once a month. "Once you have data, you can test them out and make informed decisions going forward."

I think the various trending tools that are free, like Google Trends, Microsoft AdCenter, BlogPulse, Alexa (Alexaholic) are still, in a way, immature.  Results you get out of them are to be used as insight, you can’t go to the bank with any of it.