Topix recently increased the scope of it’s news and blog search engine to cover one year of time and created an interactive graph, according to Strategic Public Relations.

Topix Expands its Search Features

Topix is now offering a more powerful way to search for online conversations.

It provides one year of blog and news results and serves them up in a visual graph so you can see how the results play out over 12 months.

A search on iPod yielded 128,000 results.

And while it is not surprising that our little sound machine gets a lot of online traction, you can see that January and February were really big months.

To find out why, Topix allows you to narrow the search to a specific time period by simply clicking the blue bars in the graph.

The MacHeads (Big Macs? Mac Daddies?) among you will recall that a flood of new iPod accessories were announced at MacWorld in January and Apple Computer came out with more iPod gadgetry in February. Topix gives the rest of us a fast, easy and fun way to find this out.

And since you can discern between news outlet and blog results, Topix helps illustrate, quite literally, the expanding news cycle.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I did a search on "Mel Gibson" and got most of the buzz in July, but some in June as well; but I did not see any real news (more like Father’s day stuff).

A search on Clay Aiken brought up 79,000 results, with the most recent result being 39 minutes ago - much better than Blogpulse, which appears to be a couple of days behind the current date when you search on news.  Also Blogpulse only gives you 6 months of trend data, Topix gives you one year of data.  However, Topix does not compare searches (ie; Clay Aiken vs. Kelly Clarkson) while BlogPulse does do that.

A search on Amy Crehore brought up 16 results but I noticed that when you hover over a result you get the source of where it came from without having to click on the actual result (very nice)!  I’m  noticing you get more results by clicking on a bar in the trend chart to narrow the search.

Something really intriquing happens when you put a ZipCode into Topix search.  I put in mine and got all the news about Brookyn, NY over the last year, with pictures.  The data is segmented by news source as well by time.  While the zipcode is used to locate the city, it does not actually locate information about the zipcode, in particular, and that would be a nice feature, if it could be added to Topix.

By the way, on the topic of Segmentation - Webmetricsguru also paints (when he has time); I just created a self portrait called "My Segmented Life"

Would this come up in a Topix Search?  Nope, I think Topix works when someone else writes about you (noticed a search on my name brought up KMM Press Releases about my coverage of Search Engine Strategies - or references to my blog on other blogs).  BTW, my portrait is not too accurate - I was focusing on the idea of painting web segmentation and merging it with a self portrait - except the segmentation would be parts of my life.