Google announced today it’s expanding the focus of its Google Trends service – the site that lets anyone track what the world’s web searchers are looking for in both real time and non-real time. The service now includes data from more Google products beyond web search, the company says, with the addition of search data from verticals like Google News, Shopping, Images and YouTube.
The expansion makes sense given that Google searches aren’t just about people typing in keywords into a browser to see a set of standard results as a series of links. Even Google’s search results pages have long reflected the wide variety of possible search results – combining things like videos, images and news items alongside web links has been par for the course for a decade or so, since the launch of Universal Search.
As Google explains in a blog post about the changes to Google Trends, the added data will allow users to explore search results in different ways than was previously possible.
For example, a search for the keywords “Taylor Swift” via Google Trends would have let you drill down into search interest around that topic from web searches, but now you can see things like what related videos people are searching for on YouTube.
The expansion makes sense given that Google searches aren’t just about people typing in keywords into a browser to see a set of standard results as a series of links. Even Google’s search results pages have long reflected the wide variety of possible search results – combining things like videos, images and news items alongside web links has been par for the course for a decade or so, since the launch of Universal Search.
As Google explains in a blog post about the changes to Google Trends, the added data will allow users to explore search results in different ways than was previously possible.
For example, a search for the keywords “Taylor Swift” via Google Trends would have let you drill down into search interest around that topic from web searches, but now you can see things like what related videos people are searching for on YouTube.
