Google Trends: A Useful Writer's Tool

Do you love to write but sometimes have trouble finding a topic to write about? If Associated Content's Calls for Content (TM) don't interest you, but you still want to pick a subject that will generate hits, try checking out Google Trends (http://www.google.com/trends).

Google Trends (officially called "Google Trends Labs") specializes in the popularity of search terms. It enables you to see how often a particular topic has been "Googled" over the past five years, and how often it has appeared in Google News stories.

A writer looking for a topic will find the "Today's Hot Trends" section to be a goldmine of information. It lists the day's most popular search terms.

If you're like me and don't always know what a particular search term is referring to--like today's (May 28) most-searched topic: "Sarah Larson"--you can click the keywords to find out more. Up pops a page with all sorts of useful information including how "hot" the topic is (Sarah Larson is "on fire"), related search terms (George Clooney and Talia Balsam are two), when the search term peaked in popularity (four hours ago), a graph showing how interest developed in the topic throughout the day, and a list of news stories and blog posts about the keywords.

I glanced at one of the news stories and quickly discovered that Sarah Larson is an ex-girlfriend of George Clooney's who recently got dumped. This points up one of the benefits of using Google Trends: you can learn all sorts of new things (even if it's just gossip).

I used Google Trends once to find a topic to write about and it served me well. It was December 21, 2007, and I had just heard about the site, so I was dying to test my theory that picking topics from Google Trends would get me lots of hits.