Following the Buzz – Trend Tracking Tools
Over 1 billion people per month use the internet to keep up with the latest news. Unlike television, the live and unfiltered nature of the internet creates an fast paced environment where hot topics reach millions of people instantly. News these days is posted literally minutes after it happens in the real world, so these days when a big story hits, it hits hard.
For the purpose of this editorial, we’ve put together a list of online resources that track some of the hottest topics and web pages online. These resources are public domain, meaning that they’re completely free to use.
Amazon’s Alexa is a web information company that tracks the web activity across millions of websites. They offer a free index listing the “hottest” URL’s on the web. Whenever a website is recieving a sudden burst of traffic, chances are it pops up on this list.
Google Trends tracks the hottest searches on Google.com. It updates everyday, currently at once an hour. The trends here can be so interesting that I actually have Google Trends set as my homepage. Clicking on a trend will give you moer information about what caused it, including articles, blog posts, news stories.
Shopping.com Consumer Demand Index
Shopping.com may just be a generic shopping engine to anyone who’s familiar with it, but it’s not a website to be overlooked. Shopping.com is one of the top portals on the web, reaching over 6 million people per month. The Shopping.com Top Searches lets you look through the top 100 searches of every category on the website.
Search.com is a top 3,000 website that reaches over 1 million people a month. While it may not be as big as the other sites listed in this feature, it still receives a substantial number of visitors and searches.
That concludes the first part of our trend tracking series on. Stay tuned, next entry we’ll be diving into tracking social buzz.
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